Arch Linux

foe

Member

Registered: 2025-10-02

Posts: 7

GDM login screen scaling forced 125% issue

So...I am little bit confused about this issue where there seems to be no way to not force 125% scale on login screen.
Previously with Gnome 49 it seemed to not be an issue, but after an update desktop and login screen was reset to 125% scale. Setting back desktop scale is obvious, but what about login screen. It's goes over my head why in the holly of hells would anyone force 125% on login screen. Is that really a way to go these days to pray for not having forced settings/features in OS? I guess I was kinda pissed today in general, but this..oh lawd.
By now I haven't found any solutions to this...

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,928

Re: GDM login screen scaling forced 125% issue

After configuring it correctly in the normal session I'd hope that https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GDM#Se … r_settings would still work, does it not?

foe

Member

Registered: 2025-10-02

Posts: 7

Re: GDM login screen scaling forced 125% issue

Well, you made my day. Thank you very much!
THIS DOES WORK!
I was poking in close vicinity though my "experiments" didnt work.

somepaulo

Member

Registered: 2023-02-22

Posts: 3

Re: GDM login screen scaling forced 125% issue

Copying the monitors.xml from ~/.config to /etc/xdg did the trick for me. 
My install has been running since 2016, always at 100%, but only in the last update did GDM suddenly decide to switch to 125% without asking me, Microsoft style. 
I never had to touch the monitors.xml file or set up GDM in any way. Things have always just worked on this laptop for me. Go figure...

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,928

Re: GDM login screen scaling forced 125% issue

Afaik GNOME didn't support fractional scaling for the longest time, they might do now and the default screen dimension calculations now surmize 125 to be optimal for your monitors, unless you configure otherwise. This can somewhat be normal and relatively hard to do "correctly" since it's ultimately quite subjective. E.g. there was a xorg release a couple of years back that wanted to set the DPI to the correct value based on calculations, people got so used to the hardcoded 96x96 default that configuring this "more correctly" lead to most people thinking things were suddenly too big. As much as I like to harp on GNOME as the next guy, that's something that's somewhat hard to do "correct" by default (they could have written out the "back then defaults" into the xml so it would not try to calculate something anew after the user has apparently used it as such for years, but that could also conflict with more sensible changes)