I’m having trouble getting VLC to load on the MATE desktop at the right scale. The interface is just HUGE and I suspect it’s the same for other QT apps.
I’ve been playing around a bit and found that if I set a couple of environment variables in .bashrc then open a terminal and run vlc from there it uses those variables to scale the interface.
However, that does not seem to fix it for vlc opened from the MATE menu or from a launcher in the panel.
These are the environment variables and their “default” values:
QT_FONT_DPI=96
QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2
If I change these to the following, the interface is much better:
QT_FONT_DPI=55
QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.2
I’ve tried adding the variables in /etc/environment but that doesn’t help.
I’m running Mint 22.2 with MATE version 1.26.2. Is there a way to upgrade that to 1.28 BTW??
Where should I put environment variables that are read by applications in the MATE menus?
First of all, this forum is not specialized in how Mint implemented the MATE desktop because the people here are running MATE on Ubuntu, that's why the forum is called ubuntu-mate.community
The two QT_ environment variables that you mention should be setup by your system like this:
QT_FONT_DPI=96
QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1
So either you or the Mint installer did something to mess this up.
I don't know much about Mint but you might try to add the mentioned variables to $HOME/.profile
preferrably at the end of the file.
It will probably work ( I've set my personal QT_ variables also in that file ) but ofcourse I can't guarantee anything.
These are my two cents, hope this helps. Good luck !
Thanks mate, but I’ve tried setting both of those environment variables in /etc/environment, /etc/profile.d/qt.sh, ~/.profile and ~/.bashrc.
I set them to:
export QT_FONT_DPI=55
export QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.2
Which seems to work if I set them in a terminal and run vlc from the terminal but not vlc from the menu.
I actually wrote a python script that shows environment variables relating to QT and put that in the menu and the changes in all of the rc files seems to be ignored.
I’ve edited all the rc files to add each individual file to a variable called “QT_VARS_FROM” so I’m pretty sure they are all being read but the QT_FONT_DPI is still set to “96”. The .bashrc file doesn’t seem to be being read when the desktop environment loads but I doubt that’s anything to do with it.
If I open a terminal, those vars are correct BTW but that’s coming from .bashrc..
In that case your settings might be overridden by the MATE session.
To find out if this is true, try this: gsettings set org.mate.interface window-scaling-factor-qt-sync false
by the way, could it be that you accidently enabled HiDPI ?
That would explain a lot.
