xfce4 via VcXsrv Server on wsl2 issues with DPI

Question

I'm new to linux - well, not new to bash basics, but running on an old laptop for the first time a linux mint distro, and at the same time on the main windows machine running wsl2 with xfce4 via VcXsrv server.

There are a lot of tips on setting this up and I found one that worked, though it did take awhile to get the wsl ips configured with the windows firewall, being a newbie to linux.

[the setup that got me into an ubuntu distro on wsl2 through hyper-v was this one here: https://news2.x-itm.com/wsl2-gui-using-vcxsrv-complete-guide-for-beginners/ ]

Okay, so great, only in my case it seems nothing I'm doing so far gets the dpi settings configured nicely.

config.xlaunch edit -screen 0 1980x1080@1 works to resize the wsl window until the high dpi scaling override is initiated xlaunch.exe compatibility properties. Then the screen resolution is huge and fixed. It's clear, but icons, windows, fonts are too small.

Manually configuring the task bars works to resize them. Accessing xfce4-display-settings from the wsl terminal doesn't allow resolution resizing, as you only need to drag the window to change that (I installed ubuntu with gdm3).

So digging around on the webs and came up with some suggestions, none of which work

1. add the following to user/.bashrc, and play around with them, these do nothing, actually I shouldn't say I have any clue why, starting point?

export GDK_SCALE=0.5
export GDK_DPI_SCALE=2

2. directly edit xconf, didn't find this file, doesn't specify in the thread either the root, so that's another linux newbie challenge - where is .config in this case?

.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/displays.xml

3. also looking at options for starting the server via config.xlaunch, a shortcut gui that starts VsXsrv with command line arguments, with dpi settings only these are not yet working either.

Does anyone have a fix to set DPI for for wls2 xfce4 with ubuntu gdm3?

Answer 1

What worked was dropping the configuration from those files and scaling to 2x through one of the configuration managers (on the desktop), then adjusting also the DPI settings and the font size. This was an Linux Mint.

Answer 2

With WSL2 you can run graphical programs without extra software. The scaling is an issue out of the box, but can be fixed by:

1. As administrator wsl --shutdown
2. as user create/edit file .wslgconfig in your c:\users\name\
In that file put the following lines:
[system-distro-env]
WESTON_RDP_DISABLE_FRACTIONAL_HI_DPI_SCALING=false
WESTON_RDP_FRACTIONAL_HI_DPI_SCALING=true

Answer 3

sudo nano /etc/bash.bashrc

If you want all Qt5 based apps to be scaled at 150% as well, you can add the following: export QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.5