How to fix blurry display in Virtual Machine Manager Console

libvirt's Virtual Machine Manager may show a blurry display and text in a VM console.

July 16, 20269 views0

I am using libvirt's Virtual Machine Manager on my Linux Mint workstation for a couple of KVMs. This is an excellent – and free – manager for virtual machines and it works great. Even for Windows VMs.

On a specific Virtual Machine I noticed a blurry display and therefore also text in the console.

Blurry text inside Virtual Machine Console

I tried changing the display resolution inside the VM, but that did not help either.

Instead I found a specific setting that was enabled. At the top menu select View -> Scale Display. There are a couple of options:

Always
Only when Fullscreen
Never
Auto resize VM with window

The option was set to Always.

Scale Display setting is set to Always, which causes the blurry display.

After changing this setting to "Never", the text inside the console appeared sharp again (because the display is no longer stretched).

Finally sharp text again in the VM console!

To make the before-and-after setting change more clear, look at the side by side comparison below.

Blurry text before changing the Scale Display setting on the left. — Blurry text before changing the settings on the left.

Claudio Kuenzler

Claudio already wrote way over 1000 articles on his own blog since 2008. He is fascinated by technology, especially Open Source Software. As a Senior Systems Engineer he has seen and solved a lot of problems - and writes about them.