Two items recently covered on this site, the upcoming release of GNOME 3.12 and Ubuntu’s intention to support Hi-DPI displays in 14.04 LTS, combined neatly over the weekend.
Thanks to a recent commit to GNOME Shell, April’s release of GNOME 3.12 will come with improved support for high-resolution displays, such as that used in the Chromebook Pixel and Lenovo Yoga Pad 2.
Support for GNOME on HiDPI screens was formally introduced in the 3.10 stable release last year. While this ensured the adequate resizing of most desktop interface elements, windows and icons the implementation, background mechanics and extent of scaling lacked finesse and refinement.
The latest drop of code brings some of that sorely needed refinement with it by adding Hi-DPI integer scaling to the Clutter-based Shell Toolkit (‘st’):
Doing the handling in st’s css code and adjusting the icon sizes should be enough to get high dpi working. This patches (sic) implement the former and it seems to work pretty well.
The change reportedly fixes a number of outstanding scaling issues, including incorrectly sized icons and thumbnails in Alt+Tab switcher, the Dash app dock, and the top bar panel.
GNOME 3.12 is scheduled for release in early April.