This is part of a series on moving from desktop Linux back to Windows.
The first post is here. The previous post is here.
In the first post, I mentioned that one of the motivators for moving back to Windows was that I really liked the hardware of the Lenovo Yoga 920.
I bought one of the “4k Ultra HD Touch Screen” models, not because I cared about the 4k but because it was overall better spec’d. I’m not even sure 4k is realistically perceptible, or useful, on a 14″ laptop.
In fact, on Windows 10, it does have a drawback: lots of apps I’ve installed by default show up really small and fuzzy. And some apps, while “right-sized”, had fairly fuzzy text.
One of the first apps I installed (via Chocolatey, see previous post) was Launchy. And after installing it and activating it with alt-space, I got this:
See how small that is in the pic? Crazytown. It should look like this:
I got the same thing for other apps such as Gimp and VS Code.
Fortunately, the fix is straightforward, if annoying since it seems you have to do it on a per-app basis.
The trick is to change the “Compatibility — High DPI Scaling” setting to either “Application” or “System” (a bit more on that later), for each app that suffers from this problem. Here’s how:
- Use the
winkey to open up the Windows search bar. - Type the name of the app in question
- When the app pops up, right click and select “Open file location”
- Then, select the app, right click, and click “Compatibility”
- Check the checkbox beside “Override high DPI…”
- Select either “Application” or “System”
- Click “OK” and re-launch the app and see if it helps
My experience so far is that:
- “System” works best most of the time for apps whose UI was really tiny
- “Application” works for apps whose UI was right-sized — like Firefox — but whose text was fuzzy
Props to this post about fuzzy fonts for leading me to this solution, which fixed more than just fuzzy fonts for me.
Next post: Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)