Allow GNOME fractional scaling below 100%

It is mostly possible in 17.10 already, except there is no nice GUI for the setting and icons in the dock and headerbars will refuse to scale down. Try:

  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 0.85

So the setting exists. We just lack a GUI for it in gnome-control-center.

I believe this is about display scale (in Display settings) - not about font. I'm also looking for a way to scale the display below 100%.

Display scaling below 100% is very much required to run on lower resolution displays.
Text scaling is not enough for that.

The ubuntu dock and window borders appear chunky on 1366 X 768.

I also think this is needed. I'm on focal fossa and everything is so big. I'd imagine it's good on WQHD and above screens but it sucks on my screen which is Fulll HD.

As a workaround, and arguably better solution, do what I do:

  Gnome Tweaks > Fonts > Interface Text = size 10 or 9

@Daniel van Vugt, it doesn't work on Gnome Shell.

That's probably bug 1717453 :(

Ironically this is how Xorg fractional scaling already works. So it's definitely possible but we have no GUI to configure it.

You can in theory configure it yourself using something like:

  xrandr --output OUTPUT --scale ...

It's probably best not to implement fractional scaling below 100% because it would have the same performance problems as Xorg fractional scaling already does.

Instead I recommend:

 1. Shrink your text, for example:

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 0.75

 2. Shrink your dock, for example:

    gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock dash-max-icon-size 16

Resurrecting this somewhat.

The solutions suggested above are fine if you only have one monitor, but immediately cause issues if you have more than one (and they're not similar in size and resolution).

Here, on two out of my three screens, everything is exactly as I want.
The third one is a little large. Rendering at .8 or .9 would be great. What I'd currently have to do is:

1. shrink text
2. shrink dock
3. increase fractional scaling of the other two screens

I am not certain why fractional scaling below 100% would cause any different performance issues than fractional scaling above 100%, but it is certainly something that I have wanted for a long time.... sometimes the fact that it would cause some blurring as the image would be scaled to contain more pixels than the display... is not a problem.

Please do consider allowing this if it is possible, even if it is not directly exposed to the user on most distros, accessing it through gnome-tweaks or dconf would be fine.

Apparently it was partially implemented in GNOME 42 (Ubuntu 22.04):
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/commit/bfb7151c

1. Enable fractional scaling in Settings and set it to 100%.
2. Edit ~/.config/monitors.xml and change the scale value to 0.5
3. Log in again.

I tried the suggestion in #13 to manually edit .config/monitors.xml without success, I do hope this can eventually be realised.

@james-fsck you need to adapt the position values (x,y) as well to the scale as I outlined in the linked upstream issue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1465#note_1582649