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How can I change UI font?

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by Matt

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I'm trying to use Thunderbird on Linux, and the UI font is huge. Fonts in both KDE and GTK apps looks sensibly small, but the thunderbird font is ~ twice the size.

Where/how can I change it?

Font is similarly huge in Firefox, so it could be related.

I'm trying to use Thunderbird on Linux, and the UI font is huge. Fonts in both KDE and GTK apps looks sensibly small, but the thunderbird font is ~ twice the size. Where/how can I change it? Font is similarly huge in Firefox, so it could be related.
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Chosen solution

very few things on linux are user friendly. This is exacerbated by fonts that are not consistent across distributions and generally fonts that in the past have been of very poor quality using bitmaps instead of vectors. Supporting Linux is in many ways supporting many many operating systems as each windows manager and GUI has it's own issues and quirks. "Open source" drivers are rarely as good as their closed source equivalents. If the issue was caused by Thunderbird/Firefox you would not be able to fix it using Linux commands. Which is what you have done. Although the mozilla platform does have scaling settings.

See https://winaero.com/blog/enable-hidpi-scaling-firefox/

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Based on some random talk on IRC, I got it to work better by doing:

echo "Xft.dpi: 75" >> ~/.Xresources ; xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources

But that doesn't strike me as particularly user-friendly solution.

Modified by depesz1

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Chosen Solution

very few things on linux are user friendly. This is exacerbated by fonts that are not consistent across distributions and generally fonts that in the past have been of very poor quality using bitmaps instead of vectors. Supporting Linux is in many ways supporting many many operating systems as each windows manager and GUI has it's own issues and quirks. "Open source" drivers are rarely as good as their closed source equivalents. If the issue was caused by Thunderbird/Firefox you would not be able to fix it using Linux commands. Which is what you have done. Although the mozilla platform does have scaling settings.

See https://winaero.com/blog/enable-hidpi-scaling-firefox/