A few months ago, I found out from my workplace’s IT service desk that I could get a 24" monitor and laptop dock for free for working remotely. I had made do with my small work laptop’s screen with heavy use of Alt-Tab, but it was a lot less eyestrain to use a reasonably sized monitor.
A few days ago, I finally got around to doing the same for my personal ThinkPad. I have a ThinkPad dock I bought used for college a few years ago, so I hooked up an extra monitor and VGA cable that’s been sitting in my basement. The dual-display worked out-of-the-box (not my 2016 experience with KDE!), but the image sharpness seemed low. GNOME’s fractional scaling didn’t work and produced an unusable zoomed-in view. From a screen resolution detector website, I found out the screen was displaying at a device pixel ratio (DPR) of 1.25, so showing only 1536x864 logical pixels, scaled up to 1920x1080 physical pixels. I remembered I had turned on “Large Text” Ubuntu Accessibility option for my laptop screen to make all the UI bigger, and that carried over to the new monitor. I turned it off, but then the UI was too small on both screens. In Gnome Tweaks, I adjusted their Scaling Factor to 1.20x, which makes the desktop UI bigger without changing the DPR.
Some sharp text appeared very subtly smudged down the center of the screen, but this was an artifact of the monitor’s VGA clock/focus being set incorrectly. The Lagom LCD monitor test pages will make any monitor issues immediate and even may cause the monitor to make weird noises. Just be sure you don’t have the browser zoom set to 110% as I had, which throws off everything, including the browser’s DPR.