Under Xorg app windows unscaled until gnome tweaks is launched.

[Rachel Greenham]

Today I learned from omgubuntu how to reset my gnome/ubuntu desktop settings (dconf reset -f /), and thought I'd do it, seeing as I had upgraded from a Zesty install at an earlier stage of 17.10's pre-release period, and further customised as time went on in the normal way of things. Some of the issues I've been having have apparently disappeared, which is good. This has not:

On login with this 4K screen (and after bug #1717272 was fixed), desktop scale setting is set to 200% as I'd wish, and gnome-shell is scaled correctly. But the text of the Rubbish Bin icon on the desktop, and the windows of, for instance, Files, Software and Terminal, are all unscaled. (See screenshot.)

When I launch gnome-tweaks, all these other windows immediately become correctly scaled, and everything remains properly scaled for the remainder of the session. Note, I haven't *changed* any settings in gnome-tweaks, all I did was *launch* it. (See second screenshot, which it looks like I need to attach to a reply as I can't see how to attach two screenshots to the OP.)

(In between the two screenshots I also launched the main settings control panel. Launching this doesn't do anything AFAIK, I was just checking what the default desktop scaling was - and it was 200%, though this might not be a dconf thing and thus survives from before the reset.)

This seems only to affect Gnome/Ubuntu sessions under Xorg, not Wayland. I was experiencing this before the dconf reset on two machines, one with nvidia graphics, one with intel iris graphics, so this one, at least, seems not to be an nvidia-related issue.

It looks like some value relating to scaling, that affects many apps, is not properly set in Xorg until gnome-tweaks is launched and presumably explicitly refreshes things.

Note, a comment on an earlier bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1713323/comments/12 asked about whether launching gnome tweaks changed anything. For me at the time it didn't, so I said so and it seemed unrelated to *that* issue, but I am now seeing it relating to this issue, so wanted to report it clearly as a separate thing - especially seeing as that issue was eventually marked a duplicate of another which has been resolved, whereas this issue still clearly is not resolved.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10
Package: mutter 3.26.0+20170925~ea214fb-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-12.13-generic 4.13.3
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-12-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.7-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Mon Oct 2 11:05:35 2017
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-07-30 (63 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" - Release amd64 (20170412)
SourcePackage: mutter
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to artful on 2017-08-22 (40 days ago)

[Rachel Greenham (rachel-strangenoises)]

Attaching second screenshot referred to in original post...

[Rachel Greenham (rachel-strangenoises)]

Seems to have gone away with recent upgrades. I can't tell exactly which as I was attempting to use wayland under amd and even under nvidia-387 (which worked fine except for a couple of random system freezes during closing windows). Back on nvidia/xorg because of that (although not exhaustively tested that *that* isn't still going to happen), and the scaling problem appears to have resolved. Guessing that was fixed upstream in 3.26.1.

mutter version 3.26.1-1
gnome-shell 3.26.1-0ubuntu1
nvidia-387 387.12-0ubuntu0~gpu17.10.1 from graphics-drivers/ppa

There were problems *selecting* 200% scaling in this environment with two monitors. I had to try several times before it took, but it did eventually. That'll be a different bug though.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 17.10 (artful) reached end-of-life on July 19, 2018.

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