Lewis's questions

I am using Ubuntu 18.10.

I am trying to create two aliases in my .bashrc for commands to "resdown" and "resup" (i.e. decrease and increase my screen resolution respectively).

The resdown command is as follows, and works just fine:

xrandr --output DP-2 --mode 3840x2160

The issue I have is with resup. When I run the following:

xrandr --output DP-2 --mode 3840x2160

The UI scaling is set back to 100%. I need to change the scaling to 200%, or everything on my 4K display is incredibly small.

I have been experimenting with the "--scale" option for xrandr, but it entirely screws up my display. As such, I am not sure that it is doing what I think it is doing:

xrandr --output DP-2 --mode 3840x2160 --scale 2x2

If I used my second monitor to go back into gnome-control-center, I can set the screen resolution and scaling just fine, and everything goes back to normal. I want, however, to do this from the command line.

Basically - I want to know how to set the "Scale" setting that you see in gnome-control-center (see below) from the command line. How can I do this?:

I have a small but annoying problem that I just can't figure out.

I have two installations of Ubuntu 18.04. One on my laptop, one on my desktop.

Whenever I open gnome-terminal on my desktop it defaults to being a maximised window. I know some people like it maximised by default (and there are plenty of forum posts etc. advising how this might be done), but I personally want it to appear in a small window.

No matter what I do, I can't seem to get it to let go of this behavior. I checked the Man pages for command line arguments I might specify, but nothing. I don't know where it has picked up this habit.

Anyone care to enlighten me as to where the application might be getting this instruction? And how I might turn it off?

Just to mention, if I create another user account and log in with that, this does not happen. As such, something in my own profile must be driving it.. just not sure where to look.

There is a complete background below (borne out of frustration) as to why I want to know this - but the basic question is how do I completely reset Xserver to the state it was in when I installed Ubuntu? I have searched over months for a way to do this and nothing has worked so far.

Thoughts on the general problem are also more than welcome. I am using Ubuntu-gnome 15.10. My linux/ubuntu knowledge is probably... "intermediate".

General Background

I (unfortunately) own a laptop with hybrid graphics (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M is the secondary GPU). This has given me no end of problems. I use Ubuntu Gnome, and have reinstalled it more times than I can count.

In the past I have tried to use the recommended Nvidia binary drivers package provided in Ubuntu. This does work initially, however, quite often a simple "apt-get upgrade" will break X and dump me at a black screen after boot. It is then almost impossible to recover as even purging all Nvidia packages and using ubuntu-drivers at the command line to change to nouveau (deleting the xorg.conf file too) doesn't seem to restore my graphics (even though that makes no sense... as surely that puts me back at the start?). I try all the available Nvidia packages (purging each time) but always end up at the black screen. I then reinstall Ubuntu Gnome and use the exact same Nvidia driver package, and it works!

This drives me insane. Purging Nvidia drivers and deleting xorg.conf doesn't seem to be enough somehow. Something about nvidia seems to linger and isn't fixed until I reinstall.

Bumblebee

More recently I tried to install Bumblebee as a possible end to my problems (i.e. as an alternative to using the Nvidia drivers for the entire X session). I reverted my main driver to nouveau (in the additional drivers app provided in ubuntu) and installed bumblebee following the standard Ubuntu guide. It didn't work with my card ("cannot access secondary gpu could not load gpu driver"), so I tried to upgrade the Nvidia drivers that Bumblebee uses (again following the instructions). This broke X. I purged Bumblebee and all related packages and reverted to nouveau.

X is still broken! and strangly an Nvidia based xorg.conf file is being generated on each boot (I deleted it and it comes back) even though I have purged all Nvidia packages....?

Question

As such, I want to know the most aggressive way I can simply reset Xserver and all associated packages each time this happense so I don't have to do a full reinstall. I want to know this for the future as it would be nice to at least be able to restore my system to a state where I can boot to a GUI and then try different options.

Research

I have already seen this and this. The first is the most relevant, but doing that never works for me. Simply purging the Nvidia drivers doesn't seem to be enough. Something about Nvidia seems to linger (e.g. now when I have a magically reappearing Nvidia based xorg.conf file even though I have no nvidia packages installed).