At the moment, so far as I am aware, there is no global scaling option. However, by a combination of altering various system font sizes, panel sizes, icon sizes etc, it is possible to resolve the issues you mention. I have done this on my own machine so can confirm this.
If you need any further advice on anything specific, please let me know on here and I will do my best to help.
Thanks for the response. Those fixes don't quite work the way I want. Chrome is still painfully small even with the content set to "very large" and the zoom set to 150% - this also does not change the way the the task bar itself looks.
Adjusting the system font sizes helps a little, but if made too large they begin to look awkward and out of place/don't fit in the windows. Windows and icons stay very small.
I guess I'll just have to lower the screen resolution which is a shame because I paid a lot of money for this laptop
Hopefully the developers will add a universal scaling option at some point kind of like Ubuntu has (see picture below).
I was looking for a way to do this and came across this post. I have a multi-step setup that scales the fonts, the icon sizes, and the pointer size. I also document setting the greeter so that even it is larger. It’s not perfect, but it is much better. http://goinglinux.com/articles/HiDPIonLinux_en.htm
Eventually I’m sure we will have a better solution, but for now, this is working for me.
I have the same problem. I decided to use 1080 screen resolution and scale Firefox windows to 170% and scale the mouse to large. I think my eyes can not see the difference in higher resolution (I am 52). But, I read somewhere that Ubuntu Mate will fix this problem in 17.10 or 18.04… For me, Ubuntu Mate is the best distro I have used so it is wort waiting for a fix
For people who changed font DPI, but ended up with inconsistent scaling of icons. I stumbled upon a potential fix.
I am running Ubuntu 17.04 with Mate Desktop.
mate-tweaks -> Panel -> (click) Save Panel Layout
Looked into its source code a little bit, but haven’t figured out what cause the fix.
As far as I can tell, when one clicks Save Panel Layout, it kills your panel, read your panel configurations and saves them somewhere, then it write the configuration back and restart your panel with '‘mate-panel --replace’.