Gnome shell can't save screen resolution
Probable Cause
I assume that your monitor reports the high screen resolution as being preferred; unfortunately this information is used by GNOME Shell on each login to reset the resolution.
How to Fix
I had the opposite problem: my monitor reported a lower preferred screen resolution (1280x1024) than the one I wanted to use (1600x1200). The fix I have used will hopefully be applicable analogously to your problem, though. Here’s what I did:
I ran xrandr -q
to find out what the current preferred screen resolution is and what other screen resolutions (or rather “mode lines”) are available. In the output, the mode line marked with a +
is the current prefferred one. It also matched the currently used one (marked with a *
). Here’s the output for me (abbreviated):
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 8192 x 8192
DVI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DIN disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-1 connected primary 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 352mm x 264mm
1280x1024 85.0*+ 75.0 60.0
1920x1440 60.0
…
1600x1200 85.0 75.0 70.0 65.0 60.0
…
To override the preferred screen resolution, I have created the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf
with the following content:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "DVI-1"
Option "PreferredMode" "1600x1200"
EndSection
As you can see, I took both the monitor identifier DVI-1
and the new preferred mode line name 1600x1200
from the xrandr -q
output. You should replace these values according to your own setup.
After a logout (or reboot), the new preferred mode line was automatically used for both my display manager and for GNOME Shell. The new (abbreviated) output of xrandr -q
was the following:
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1600 x 1200, maximum 8192 x 8192
DVI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DIN disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-1 connected primary 1600x1200+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 352mm x 264mm
1600x1200 85.0*+ 75.0 70.0 65.0 60.0
1280x1024 85.0 + 75.0 60.0
1920x1440 60.0
…