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I'm thinking of buying an HP Spectre x360 13" laptop with QHD display and installing Mint on it and using Wine to run some Windows apps. I was wondering if anyone had experience with Wine's support for HiDPI displays - do the apps run on Wine on a HiDPI display look good?

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In my case, wine apps don't look really good.

winecfg has a setting for the screen resolution which you can set to 210 dpi (in my case).

However,

  • this seems to affect only on some of the graphic elements of a wine application: For instance, the menu bar is unaffected in my case.
  • If you connect an external monitor or occasionally want to switch to another screen with non-HiDPI resolution, this is not an elegant way as you have to return to winecfg each time to adjust the DPI. Wine should follow the X-server DPI setting, but this doesn't seem to happen at the moment.

I'm running wine 1.9.19 on an arch linux on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon.

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  • This solution works a lot better in 2020, although the preview text in winecfg is too large compared to the actual result. Still hoping for native X-Server DPI support.
    – DaVince
    Commented May 22, 2020 at 5:25
  • What is required to install winecfg? I have Adobe Acrobat running under wine, but command not found for winecfg.
    – davidparks21
    Commented Nov 26, 2021 at 20:41
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Note: Recent versions of Wine (may) no longer need this.

In addition to what LaTechneuse stated, you also need to manually change the desktop metrics using regedit.exe, otherwise the most of the system menus and labels will still remain small.

The values you need to change are located in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Window Metrics:

  1. Replace all the REG_SZ values, except for IconTitleWrap (it should be 1), to value*2 (e.g. change -135 to -270, 1 to 2, 32 to 64, etc.)
  2. Change the very first byte in all of the REG_BINARY values (CaptionFont, MenuFont, etc.) to byte*2 (e.g. change 04 to 08, etc.). Remember that the values are hexadecimal.

When editing the REG_BINARY values, be careful not to shift any bytes accidentally. Place your cursor after the value you need to replace, then press Backspace once, then enter the new value.

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    This is pretty cool, but I tried it and it didn't have the desired result, at least not for what I needed it for (Photoshop) and didn't really help even when looking at stock applications like regedit. It made the menus, status bar, and various other common UI elements larger and more spaced out, but setting DPI in winecfg had already done that. Other elements remained unchanged.
    – tobek
    Commented Oct 6, 2018 at 18:06
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    Recent versions of Wine no longer need changing window metrics manually, setting dpi in the Wine config should be enough. As to Photoshop, I think it uses its own library to draw the GUI, so there may be no way to fix that.
    – Efenstor
    Commented Oct 7, 2018 at 20:11

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