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Accepted
Vincenzo Pii
Asked: 2020-04-24 13:10:57 +0800 CST

Steam fonts are very small on Ubuntu 20.04

  • 772

My screen resolution is 2560x1440 and I am using fractional scaling at 125%.

Steam fonts are unreadable (see the screenshot and compare with the size of the Chrome icon).

enter image description here

fonts steam hdpi

6 Answers

  1. If you want to start steam with scaled UI from launchpad, you can set GDK_SCALE=2 (as mentioned in the accepted solution) in steam.desktop file (in my case it is located in /usr/share/applications).

    First, open the file in your favourite text editor (e.g. gedit). You might need superuser privileges:

    gedit /usr/share/applications/steam.desktop

    Then change the Exec entry value to:

    Exec=sh -c 'GDK_SCALE=2 /usr/games/steam %U'

    Note: your steam path can be different to mine (/usr/games/steam). Just use the path from your Exec entry.

    • 9

  2. Find the bin_steam.sh:

    $ which steam
// >> /usr/bin/steam
$ ls -la /usr/bin/steam
// >> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Jul 29  2020 /usr/bin/steam -> ../lib/steam/bin_steam.sh
$ ls -la /usr/lib/steam/bin_steam.sh
// >> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5946 Jun 21 14:26 /usr/lib/steam/bin_steam.sh

    Edit bin_steam.sh:

    $ sudo gedit /usr/lib/steam/bin_steam.sh

    Add at the beginning export GDK_SCALE=2:

    File changes

    Run Steam as usual and see the changes ;)

    • 7
  3. Best Answer

    If you start Steam from a terminal with the command GDK_SCALE=2 steam it seems to work.

    I found the answer on a Manjaro help page.

    • 4

  4. I had the same issue with Steam and Spotify. Changed the fractional scaling back to 100% from 125% and the fonts went back to being readable.

    • 0

  5. Start steam client adding parameters -w 1368 -h 768 or whatever size you want, always smaller than your monitor resolution. The smaller value, the bigger overall size of steam client, including fonts.

    You may add parameters to your Windows shortcut, it works in Linux shortcuts too.

    • 0

  6. Or if all else fails, you could run steam on bottles and change the scaling through it

    • -1