In our testing of HiDPI, we noticed a problem with the Humanity icon set that ships with Ubuntu. The Humanity icon set was lacking support for @2x icons, the lack of which made icons in some applications appear much larger than they should.



The @2x icon problem also created strange behavior in Ubiquity (the Ubuntu installer) as well, which users see during initial setup on our preinstalled machines. In Ubiquity, a Humanity icon was in use in the header bar, which resulted in the panel being expanded, causing it to look strange.

Before:



System76 engineer David Jordan noted the adjustment to Humanity fixed the issue seen in Ubiquity:



“So, I’ve been working on adding hidpi support in the Humanity icon theme today, and noticed that the blue accessibility icon looks like one of the icons in Humanity. After installing my updated Humanity icon (with @2x support added) the blue accessibility icon is the correct size, and the panel is no longer double height. The icon was simply too big and the panel was resizing to match, so updating humanity to support @2x icons should fix the incorrect panel height.”

After:

The differences within Ubuntu itself are more subtle, but they are important, especially when it comes to the selection of the right icon. In Xenial, the icons before and after the 2x change are obviously different, but the biggest difference is the correct icon for “Open” in transmission being chosen after the change (vs the wrong icon, the folder with an up arrow coming out of it before).

Xenial Before:

Xenial After:

Here are the changes in Yakkety, more subtle, but Transmission is still wrong before, and the 2x is crisper for the other icons.

Yakkety Before:

Yakkety After:

We’re very proud to have contributed this fix, as it will improve the HiDPI experience across all Ubuntu devices (including ours). We look forward to shipping more machines with HiDPI displays, and this is a positive step forward in that arena. We also need to thank the elementary OS project for providing us with details on how to best support HiDPI.



Our users should have already seen these improvements pushed to them via our PPA. Those who aren’t using a beautiful System76 computer will see the improvement once the patch we submitted is merged.

For those who want to learn more about the bugs that we patched (link above), here is the Ubiquity double header bug and here is the bug for within Ubuntu.

Thanks for reading, and if you encounter any HiDPI bugs please file them in Launchpad!

