Gnome 3.36 and Fractional Scaling

Top view of the SimplyNUC Hades Canyon 8i7HVK

My latest Intel NUC unit from SimplyNUC is a Hades Canyon 8i7HVK. I have written about the power and quiet nature of these NUC units before, but this unit is a break from all my previous NUCs. It comes packed with 64GB of DDR4 RAM, two 1TB SSD drives in RAID-1, four VR ready 4K video ports, dual GB NICs, four 3.1 USB ports and five USB 3.1 ports. It is a monster in a very small NUC package. The unit is about twice as wide as a normal NUC and about an inch and a half deeper at: 8.7″ x 5.6″ x 1.54″. It is slightly taller than the normal NUCs, but shorter than the “full height” versions.

Front ports on the Hades Canyon NUC

I received this unit in December 2019 with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installed. The 3.28 version of Gnome running on the system did not support display “Fractional Scaling” – which made some applications much too small (or in 200% mode much too big) to read and use well. Some research showed that a newer version of Gnome would support Fractional Scaling with 125%, 150%, and 175% options available. The 20.04 LTS version Ubuntu includes Gnome 3.36 which does support Fractional Scaling.

Back ports of the Hades Canyon NUC

Right now Ubuntu 20.04 does not provide direct upgrades from the 18.04 LTS release until the 20.04.1 release arrives. I did download the ISO and ran it under virtualization and can see the Fractional Scaling option exists!

I will soon be moving my development environments over and moving from the Ubuntu Unity desktop to Gnome in this high-powered mini-PC with 64GB of RAM, a quad core i7 processor, and amazing video power.

Ted Cahall