I thought it a fluke the first time it happened to me but when participating in the BigDaddyLinux Live “LUG” meeting on 25 July 2020, the elements were all large and I just couldn’t handle the gigantic everything with the UI. I though maybe my computer was concerned about me needing readers and was starting to scale things up. Zoom is known for doing silly things after an update but I wasn’t willing to wait for another update to correct this awful Zoomed in UI. Now, if it was April 1st, I would have considered it a kind of joke.
After some web searching on DuckDuckGo, I found this on Reddit and after reading down a bit, I found a solution. Rather than wait for another week, I had to try it out immediately, so, this is what I did:
Using Nano in the terminal, I opened up the config file for Zoom
nano ~/.config/zoomus.conf
From there, you have to change the “autoScale” option to “false”
Next, I quit completely out of Zoom, restarted it and joined the meeting again. Zoom was back to normal. Now everything is good again. I don’t have to page over for more than 12 participants.
It feels good when you can find a solution for an irritating problem and bring to order a bit of the “chaos” out of your little corner of the world.
Final Thoughts
Zoom gets a lot of flak but I truly think Zoom is pretty great. It work well and is mostly reliable. Sure, it does some odd things but just about every application has some weirdness to it that I have ever used. Thankfully, this odd happening was easily corrected.
References
Zoom Meeting Home Page
Zoom Thread on Reddit
DuckDuckGo Web Search Engine
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