I hope this is the right place to ask about these issues. I’m experiencing some persistent issues with display scaling and resolution rendering on my Kubuntu 26.04 setup, and I’m hoping for some guidance from the KDE community.
Low Resolution Quality: If I run the system at the native 1920x1080 resolution, the image quality on this 27" screen looks unusually poor compared to what I expect. It looks better on my previous 24.5" monitor.
Native Resolution Scaling Issues: When I switch to the native 2560x1440 resolution, the text and UI elements become too small to use comfortably without significant scaling. I tried setting the global scale factor to 135%, which seems to be the only option where the size feels right.
Application-Specific Scaling: Even at 135%, some applications do not handle the scaling correctly. For example, in LibreOffice, certain interface elements look misaligned.
Login Screen: After a reboot, the login screen appears very small, indicating that the scaling settings are not being applied consistently before the user session starts.
Has anyone else encountered similar inconsistencies? Are there specific configuration tweaks that might resolve these gaps?
This is because the new monitor must do the scaling from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 itself and it usually looks bad (unless you got a dual-mode monitor which can natively do 1920x1080 or it’s an integer scale, which this one is not).
That’s the intended usage, use native resolution and then use scaling to your liking. HiDPI and fractional scaling have been developed for this (as we get small screens with higher resolutions). To note, you also have the option for behaviour of legacy apps regarding scaling on the page to tweak for some.
Unfortunately, yeah some apps still don’t apply scaling correctly. Either they don’t support scaling (X11 apps) and depending on the previous option, they are not scaled or blurry. For the others, they do the operations themselves, but if done incorrectly (like it seems there), it can break UI. You’d probably have more luck reporting to the application’s devs to ask for better handling.
Display settings are separated between the two, especially because on multi-user systems, each user can have their own scaling settings. If you want to apply your current settings to the login screen, you need to go on the Login Screen settings page and click “Apply Plasma Settings” which carries them over.
Thanks for the really helpful answer on all of my questions, it really makes a lot of sense now! Seems like I’m learning something new everyday. Thank you.
But regarding:
My black themed colors actually transfered over to the login screen now, which is good. But the scaling is still like at 100%, so that interestingly didn’t apply and things are still small on there. But other than that everything seems to work fine with my new monitor!
