monitor scaling on Linux

Hardware
1

Hi,

I just got my new monitor, an Asus Proart 27", based in part on some very helpful discussions here. The highest resolution is 3840x2160, and looks amazing. However, the default text and GUI elements are too small at this setting. If I scale it up things are better:

xrandr --output HDMI-A-0 --primary --fb 3840x2160 --scale 0.6

However, beyond the obvious visual change, I don’t understand what scaling does. Am I throwing away resolution when I do this? Would it be better to tweak the default font and GUI sizes, in order to make the display usable at full resolution?

2

After some searching I found the following:

https://www.howtogeek.com/302916/what-is-the-difference-between-scaling-and-screen-resolution-in-windows/

tldr; scaling preserves resolution while shrinking or enlarging displayed elements. Meaning text and GUI buttons appear bigger, but the actual resolution remains the same. Which is what I want for editing images.

Perhaps this is obvious to others, but while there are lots of pages explaining how to do this, not so many explain what it is.

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