A modern Linux machine is pretty similar to any Windows setup in general configuration terms, but there are occasionally little details that are more difficult and even esoteric. This is especially true for my chosen flavor of Linux, Xubuntu, which is a very shorn down build and often needs software installed that we take for granted.

While working on a retromachine for a dear friend on an old laptop of theirs, I noticed that while it was as easy as anywhere to change the resolution to something reasonable, the old insanely high resolution would be in effect on the login screen. This annoyed me, and it took some effort in order to resolve it.

I found the following fix online.

First make sure you are set up on the resolution you want to be using through the display configuration, then install ARandR, a screen management program:

Then you can run ARandR through the terminal or search for it in the whisker menu.

It should automatically have your resolution and main screen status in there, but make sure it's all set in the output dropdown the way you want it to be.

Save the configuration as something like monitor-config.sh to somewhere you can find it like the desktop.

Open a text editor and make a file called lightdm.conf and put this as the contents:

Open the terminal and switch to the root user and copy that file to the screen configuration folder in the file system:

Afterwards, exit out of root and the terminal and then do a reboot and it should set the login screen resolution to match what was set up in the monitor-config.sh file. You can uninstall ARandR afterwards if you don't foresee needing it again.

Linux has a lot of little things like that, though the bigger more involved distros don't need these little tweaks, operating at a lower, more involved level always requires more personal investment.