# All the applications I install from the terminal have a very small

**URL:** <https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449>\
**Category:** Budgie Desktop\
**Created:** [December 3, 2020, 7:50am UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449 "2020-12-03T07:50:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 12\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![some\_guy\_11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e79b87/32.png) [@some\_guy\_11](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/some_guy_11)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 7:50am UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/1 "2020-12-03T07:50:24Z")

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Any application I installed using sudo in terminal has such small text that it becomes practically unreadable is there a way to fix this???

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**Author:** ![fossfreedom](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/fossfreedom/32/1405_2.png) [@fossfreedom](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/fossfreedom)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 8:45am UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/2 "2020-12-03T08:45:54Z")

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Please can you give an example of an app you have installed, the install instructions you have used and the instruction you used to run the application.

What version of Ubuntu Budgie are you using?

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**Author:** ![some\_guy\_11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e79b87/32.png) [@some\_guy\_11](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/some_guy_11)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 10:30am UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/3 "2020-12-03T10:30:11Z")

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Here is screenshot of my window (spotify and steam were installed via terminal):

 ![Screenshot from 2020-12-03 15-46-00](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/uploads/ubuntubudgie/original/2X/a/a452b3c8f1b0c557e5d9ac3bb66470ec38c2d6f0.png)

The Steam window text look extraordinarily small. The Spotify one might look reasonable but it is actually miniature.

For installing Spotify i used:

> snap install spotify

For Steam i used:

> sudo add-apt-repository multiverse  
> sudo apt-get update  
> sudo apt-get install steam

My ubuntu budgie version is

> Budgie 10.5.1

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**Author:** ![fossfreedom](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/fossfreedom/32/1405_2.png) [@fossfreedom](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/fossfreedom)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 10:32am UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/4 "2020-12-03T10:32:07Z")

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Is this a 4K display? Are you using fractional scaling? If you are using fractional scaling then what happens if you just use the 100%/200% etc?

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**Author:** ![some\_guy\_11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e79b87/32.png) [@some\_guy\_11](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/some_guy_11)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 10:47am UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/5 "2020-12-03T10:47:19Z")

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I use 150% fractional scaling  
Yes 4K  
And using any other scaling just doesn’t seem to bother these applications I tried 125 and 100 and 200

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**Author:** ![fossfreedom](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/fossfreedom/32/1405_2.png) [@fossfreedom](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/fossfreedom)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 11:00am UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/6 "2020-12-03T11:00:18Z")

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These are bugs with the fractional scaling implementation that Canonical have made available that budgie inherits.

Not alot we can do here other than advise you to file a report to launchpad

```
ubuntu-bug libmutter-7-0

```

^^^ if you are on UB 20.10 or

```
ubuntu-bug libmutter-6-0

```

^^^ if you are on UB 20.04

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**Author:** ![some\_guy\_11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e79b87/32.png) [@some\_guy\_11](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/some_guy_11)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 11:10am UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/7 "2020-12-03T11:10:41Z")

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Ok… if there is nothing that can be done…

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**Author:** ![fossfreedom](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/fossfreedom/32/1405_2.png) [@fossfreedom](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/fossfreedom)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 11:19am UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/8 "2020-12-03T11:19:03Z")

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Its highly likely that many apps cannot cope with fractional scaling - there is no set coded method to deal with fractional scales currently via GTK and possibly other toolsets. Behind the scenes GTK which many apps a built with only supports integer scaling i.e. 100%/200%

Canonical’s method is kind of a fudge trying to bypass this. If an app is scaling wrongly its probably interpreting that the display is either at 100% or 200% rather than 150% - there isnt a coded method that says “the screen is now 150%”.

Really this fractional scaling needs to be added to the GTK/mutter toolkit - I doubt this will happen with GTK+3/mutter since this is effectively now fixed without change. GTK+4 is being developed - maybe this has better fractional scaling - but of course, apps will then need to be compiled against GTK+4 and future versions of mutter which in itself is no trivial matter.

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**Author:** ![zilexa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/bbe5ce/32.png) [@zilexa](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/zilexa)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 6:12pm UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/9 "2020-12-03T18:12:48Z")

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It’s not just 4K. Any screen with a high resolution and small diagonal like 13.3" laptops with \>1920\*1080 resolution have this issue. It’s quite a disappointment app developers don’t take this into account.

For Spotify specifically the solution is easy:

```auto
usr/share/applications/spotify.desktop

 

Replace:

Exec=spotify %U

 

With:

Exec=spotify --force-device-scale-factor=2.0 %U

```

From [https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux/Spotify-Scaling-Broken-4K-Ubuntu/td-p/4792737](https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux/Spotify-Scaling-Broken-4K-Ubuntu/td-p/4792737)

For Zoom it’s also doable:

```auto
Go to $HOME/.config
Find and open the file zoomus.conf

One of the settings is ScaleFactor, set to 1 by default. Set this to 2, and next time you start the application it will have appropriate-sized visuals.

```

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![fossfreedom](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/fossfreedom/32/1405_2.png) [@fossfreedom](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/fossfreedom)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 6:16pm UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/10 "2020-12-03T18:16:25Z")

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> [@zilexa](#):
>
> It’s quite a disappointment app developers don’t take this into account.

Please do read what I wrote. There isn’t anything an app developer can hang their hat on here - so don’t “blame” developers. There isn’t an obvious way to say “this is 150% scaling”. The toolkits available just don’t have this information available.

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**Author:** ![zilexa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/bbe5ce/32.png) [@zilexa](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/zilexa)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2020, 6:58pm UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/11 "2020-12-03T18:58:52Z")

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My mistake, I didn’t read everything and thought solutions like that of Spotify would work in general for other apps.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![some\_guy\_11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e79b87/32.png) [@some\_guy\_11](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/u/some_guy_11)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 2020, 3:47am UTC](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/all-the-applications-i-install-from-the-terminal-have-a-very-small/4449/12 "2020-12-04T03:47:30Z")

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That worked…  
Thank You…