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I'm looking for a new work laptop for development work on linux, and after testing way too many distros, I pretty much does not want to ever use anything other than Xubuntu or possibly some other Debian/Ubuntu based Xfce setup.

What worries me is that most of the recent laptops with Haswell processors I have looked at also supports extremely high resolution, which would require the desktop to use higher DPI settings (HiDPI) in order to be usable.

Thus I was wondering, what is the status for HiDPI support in Xfce?

(I have found some sources claiming the support is not good at the moment, but I didn't find any info on whether it is being worked on or not!)

Samuel Lampa
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XFCE has some support for HiDPI - you can change the setting across all monitors for HiDPI, but it doesn't vary between different screens in the way that it does on a Retina MacBook Pro.

I'm using XFCE and Arch Linux on a Lenovo W540 with the high DPI display. Apart from Chrome not supporting HiDPI, things work well.

  • I think Cinnamon has better out of the box HiDPI support. – Melroy van den Berg Mar 14 '19 at 11:41
  • @danger89 that might be true, but the question is asking about XFCE, not Cinnamon. –  Mar 16 '19 at 14:51
  • Definitely true, but just for reference for people who are suffering too much in XFCE. I needed to adapt the panel icon size, set custom font size and DPI in the appearance settings. Changed the menu icon sizes. Notification icons are somehow separated too. Desktop text size as well as icons I needed to adapt. And also the file manager. I also needed to change Firefox (XFCE unrelated) and other programs like GIMP (and games). – Melroy van den Berg Mar 20 '19 at 17:38
  • There are some improvements in HiDPI support in Xfce 4.14: https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1565568000 – Alexey Vazhnov Jan 14 '20 at 18:41