If you're tired of trying to see the panel icons, especially from across the room, and you're using Budgie, as most of us are, consider installing MATE on your media computer.
I use Budgie on six of our seven computers here, but found some settings available in MATE that looked like they might help with the tiny-icons problem. Indeed they did, and I'm now using MATE on that machine. If you give this a try, be sure you change the Displays setting to HiDEF, change the Panel setting to something other than Solus ( I used openSUSE), and select the 48 px option for icon height.
The result for me turned out great! Not only can I easily operate that computer from across the living room, but there's absolutely no screen tearing, without needing to make any other tweaks.
