I was playing around with Fractional Scaling in the Display settings of ArcoLinux (xfce). This is running in a Windows 11 Hyper-V VM. I tried changing the scaling to 1.5x and 2.0x which actually makes things smaller. But, that is not the focus of this post.
When I set the scale to Custom, I was able to make the X and Y settings less than zero. I tried changing them both to 0.7 but when I clicked Apply, my screen when totally black. This would not normally be a problem as I can press ESC to revert back. But I accidently clicked my mouse again, apparently telling ArcoLinux to keep the settings.
I later learned that this changed a setting in my user folders and I probably could have gotten back in using root or some other user from the login screen as the desktop only went black after logging in. But what I did was go to a terminal session (via CTRL + ALT + F2) and log in as root. Searching the internet, I found several forum posts (see below) that led me in the right direction.
What I ended up doing was editing the file
/home/username/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/displays.xml
and changing the X and Y values under Scale from 0.7 back to 1.0. There were two locations in the file that I updated, one in the Default section and one in the Fallback section.
This got me back up and running after a reboot.
References I used to figure this out:
- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/204586/change-default-xfce-backdrop-for-all-users-via-cli
- https://www.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/r21bw5/linux_xfce_display_settings