blurry notifications

One of the rough edges of the linux/ubuntu HDPI experience is that that notify-osd scales weirdly and you get really bad anti-aliasing on fonts and images.

A brief google turned up Bug #1374301 “osd notifications blurry”, in which Steffen Coenen points out that starting notify-osd with the GDK_SCALE=1 enviromental variable fixes the problem.

I attempted to adjust this in the dbus services file like so:

#/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service
[D-BUS Service]
Name=org.freedesktop.Notifications
Exec=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/notify-osd
Environment=GDK_SCALE=1

sadly this didn’t work :(

Instead I wrote a bash script and changed the path in the service. pretty hacky but it works:

#/home/nic/bin/notify-osd
#!/bin/bash
GDK_SCALE=1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/notify-osd
#/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service
[D-BUS Service]
Name=org.freedesktop.Notifications
Exec=/home/nic/bin/notify-osd

Seems to be working well, will update if I find issues.