Screen adjustment

[moonwalkers]

What I'm about to try (maybe) is to in /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf replace 1920x1080 with something lower like around 1200 by something, keeping the same aspect ratio.  I messed with resolution this way on a Rock64 a few years ago because it defaulted to 1920x1080 and I didn't have any spare monitors that size.  The size choices needed to be predefined at a lower level and I didn't mess with that but I got a 1024x768 mode out of it.

I remember having to use initramfs because it's the only time I've ever used it, I was following directions somebody on here was feeding me.

I suppose I should get it booting from an sd again and them mess with the extlinux.conf on that because if I trash the one on my emmc I'll need to open the computer, pull it out, stick it in an adapter and edit it, then put it back to fix it.  Actually I could probably ssh to it, just realized that.  But I've been trying to use the stock resolution for 8 months now and I'm just too old to see it.  Some things work, some don't, it's usually an ordeal between the resolution and the touchpad.

I don't know if it can be changed this way on the PBP, it makes the pixels bigger at a low level, not just in X.

The way I would approach your problem is to set bigger fonts in VT and take advantage of modern GUI scaling abilities instead of lowering the resolution. Here is what I usually do in my distro of choice (Debian):

Code:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

There you can select the VT font of up to 16x32 pixels in size, double the standard size, as well is choose a perhaps more readable shape than the standard one.
For GUI my usual approach is to set DPI scaling to 100% match the real hardware--I like it when I select 100% scale in documents they nearly perfectly match the size of actual printout--and then just adjust the fonts and icon sizes. I usually adjust it towards the smaller values--the default 9pt font are too big for me--but you can also adjust them to be bigger, and most applications will honor your system settings, though some will have to be adjusted separately. Since I use KDE Plasma with SDDM my preferred way of adjusting sizes looks like this:

I put the following in my /etc/sddm.conf on PBP (yes, I still stick to X11):

Code:

[X11]
ServerArguments=-nolisten tcp -dpi 157

I put the following in my /etc/environment (among other tweaks):

Code:

GDK_DPI_SCALE=1.63

Finally, I adjust the font sizes in System Settings->Fonts->Adjust All Fonts and icon sizes in System Settings->Icons->Configure Icon Sizes. Both can be adjusted towards smaller and larger, with larger I believe what you would want.
If you use Firefox then depending on its version you may have to change layout.css.devPixelsPerPx value in about:config to the same 1.63 manually instead of leaving it at -1.0, as before certain version (not sure which) it wasn't correctly detecting system DPI.