I tried switching from Gnome (Metacity) to Ubuntu (default) because I wanted to try something with Unity. The screen appeared WAY zoomed in, with the Gnome menu bar still at the top, and the side dock momentarily visible, then disappeared. I tried switching back and logging in, and the desktop is screwed up: menus and icons about 4x the size they should be, the upper menu bar almost useless.
The screen resolution reports as 1920x1080, but is actually 1/4 of that, zoomed into the upper left quadrant. xrandr also reports 1920x1080, but if I use --scale 2.0 x 2.0, it refreshes at the correct resolution (but the menus, cursor, etc. are all wrong).
Other users are still fine; it's just my account.
Any ideas how I can "reset" this back to its correct size, etc.?
What a mess...
I got stuck in this after kids mash the keyboard.
This worked for me:
Settings -> Universal Access -> Seeing -> Zoom.
Switch it to off.
I ended up restoring all my configuration files (ie those files and directories in my home directory whose names begin with a
.or have paths beginning~/.) from a backup and that fixed it. But I never figured out what caused it.