Steam fonts are very small on Ubuntu 20.04

If you want to start steam with scaled UI from launchpad, you can set GDK_SCALE=2 (as mentioned in the accepted solution) in steam.desktop file (in my case it is located in /usr/share/applications).

First, open the file in your favourite text editor (e.g. gedit). You might need superuser privileges:

gedit /usr/share/applications/steam.desktop

Then change the Exec entry value to:

Exec=sh -c 'GDK_SCALE=2 /usr/games/steam %U'

Note: your steam path can be different to mine (/usr/games/steam). Just use the path from your Exec entry.


Find the bin_steam.sh:

$ which steam
// >> /usr/bin/steam
$ ls -la /usr/bin/steam
// >> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Jul 29  2020 /usr/bin/steam -> ../lib/steam/bin_steam.sh
$ ls -la /usr/lib/steam/bin_steam.sh
// >> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5946 Jun 21 14:26 /usr/lib/steam/bin_steam.sh

Edit bin_steam.sh:

$ sudo gedit /usr/lib/steam/bin_steam.sh

Add at the beginning export GDK_SCALE=2:

File changes

Run Steam as usual and see the changes ;)


If you start Steam from a terminal with the command GDK_SCALE=2 steam it seems to work.

I found the answer on a Manjaro help page.