Display Configuration

One of the ongoing problems I have been having is with the font and icon sizes in some applications. In the good old days one could configure each monitor individually, but the current setup which I think is handled under the X11 driver interface is that while we can select the different screen sizes and move them to match the physical layout, the 'size' function is applied globally. Another little niggle is the way things keep switching around when a monitor becomes unavailable. My long term setup previously was a set of three 27" HD monitors with a fourth slightly smaller HD TV which had it's own DVD player. The monitor still sits here to the right but the 27" monitors have been replaced by a 32" 4K monitor in the middle and I have now replaced the 19" HD monitor to the left a second 4K reconditioned monitor to keep the cost down. In addition I have currently disabled the right hand TV so that the desktop is now a clean 7680 by 2160 although I did have to take the jigsaw to the desk to allow the two displays to be side by side. Something that was not a problem with the 19" one. The one remaining niggle is that the windows machine is strugging with the high resolution of the monitor and while it works fine at 1920 by 1080, when switching to higher resolutions that the display card supports, the vertical scaling goes wrong. It does not support 4k so while I can move the start bar to the top and use the 2560x1600 maximum, the times I use the windows desktop are such that 1920x1080 is not a problem. At least the keyboard switch still works and changes between computers.

Currently I have the display global scaling set to 125% and the fonts DPI set to 144 which is sort of working for most things. The main problem here is still the restriction of some icons to a 16 pixel format. While the lemming solution has been to migrate to .svg font based icons, these have also followed the 'two colour' standard loosing the full colour versions. SVG can support full colour and so I do not see any problem in providing a scalable solution but I've not found an open source solution via that path, so the half way house of using a 32 pixel icon set looks like my best path currently for the bitweaver framework. This does not help with those icons being used in other applications!

So the next step has been to sort out a 'plasma theme' that gives me the best general layout. I have been playing with the dark themes, but I am happier with the light ones so my current subset are based on that. That there are perhaps hundreds of themes on the various download sites does not help when trying to sort out, so I have been keeping closer to the more generally available ones. It would be helpful if there was an information page like summary of just what has been selected, having to cycle through a dozen settings pages are a pain. I've wiped all the downloaded themes and am back with the default Breeze and openSUSE sets so I have a clean canvas. Having spotted that the main version of each respects the colour selection options I have a nice base setup.

Application style is a little easier to sort since I prefer to see the scroll bars which Fusion displays nicely, although MS Windows 9x would match my current backup windows machine setup. Windows decoration being managed separately just adds to the fun, and not being able to strip the unwanted styles like one can in the other selections is just annoying. That many of the available styles do not have decent function icons is now obvious on the selection screen, and Plastik has a much better contrast and icon size to all the current options although Breeze sizes are also practical. Need to clear out the ones I don't need, and I now know that it's that area that I perhaps need to look at creating my own custom style.

At least both Icons and Cursors setup screen allows the removal of entries and I've wiped both and returned to Breeze although the light version of the Cursors allows better viability of the text cursor especially when using at 54pixel size. It would just be nice if the notification icons had full colour options, perhaps another target for a custom option which will tie in with what I am looking at for the bitweaver web service framework.

Having now got the basic framework under control, the next problem IS application specific, such as the new Firefox left hand functions bar on which we are back to small icons and I get a similar problem in Thunderbird so both must be using a similar theming interface? PDF Arranger is another useful application which is unusable from the tool bars and one has to resort to the drop down menus to find a function, and changing the font sizes on Flamerobin is most definitly now a problem that needs some work. While it was usable on the left hand screen, it no longer is.

Another niggle on the desktop is that right click pop-ups can be flaky. They don't always appear, just flashing up and disappearing again. In addition they do often pop up as just a black box and I have to close and reopen. There has been comments about changing the mouse, but I've tried three now with the same results, so I consider it is a functionality problem, but just what part of the driver chain is responsible?