how would i go about making everything appear bigger, all fonts, all menus, everything, im using a living room television as my primary screen and id like everything to be bigger.. setting the DPI for fonts helps, but i also want bigger icons, bigger webpages in icecat/firefox, etc

Many desktops provide high-contrast themes and options that allow you to increase the size of icons and make items more readable.

What distro and desktop are you using?

im using archlinux with openbox, i was looking for something that would solve solve the issue more system-wide if there was one, perhaps something in display settings

Generally, icons and such are managed by the desktop environment.

The sort of changes you are looking for fall under the general category of "accessibility." It's something I know of but don't know much about managing. Though the question you asked is more about "visibility" than "accessibility," "accessibility" is the heading under which you are likely to find the most useful material.

This page from the Arch wiki may help: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Accessibility

This page from the Debian wiki may also provide some useful information:

https://wiki.debian.org/accessibilit...User_Interface

I think the bit about the magnifier may speak to some of the issues you identified.

In the browsers, you might look under the "View" item in the menu. Almost all of them include an item for "Zoom," which enables you to increase or decrease the size of webpage. In many browsers, you can choose to use your own css, rather than the css of the website, and set your preferred fonts and font sizes. For example, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...e-of-web-pages

Hope this helps get you started.

You could change the screen resolution.

Example:
Change to 720x480
Back to 1920x1080
Use your own parameters.

changing the resolution is the one thing i dont want to do, since this computer will be used for gaming and that arch page offered no assistance, is there a simple tool for change fonts and DPI thats DE independant?

how are you starting your xserver?

chances are, the file ~/.Xresources or ~/.Xdefaults is being parsed.
there you can enter dpi settings.
but afaiu that's only for fonts.
so you need a theme (gtk and openbox) that caters to your needs. icon sizes can be adjusted from within gtk themes, or inside the apps themselves.
and so on...

otoh, you tried to search the web? surely you are not the only one with this particular problem...

im using lightdm and there doesnt appear to be an .Xdefaults or .Xresources file in the user folder... i was hoping to find a solution that can handle everything but it would appear i will have to do fonts and the gtk theme separately as you mentioned.. seems i can just create an .Xdefaults file and add 'Xft.dpi: 96'

im using a 42' 1360x768 plasma screen sitting about 6-8 feet away, what would the optimal DPI setting be?

For openbox windows titles, menu, try obconf application.
For the contents of applications, it depends if they're gtk or qt based. On my openbox installation, I use lxappearance for gtk and qtconfig for qt.

have you actually tried that?
i don't use a display manager so i can't really tell you, but i'd say lightdm must have an option for sth like that...
other solution is to add the appropriate file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d - see here for some docs to get you started
(see DisplaySize, looks like the kind of setting your looking for)

imho this is a better solution than adjusting fonts manually, and with a little luck the change in size will also carry over to icons and widgets...

i switched to xfce which does have DPI settings which seem to work pretty well for what i want, the only thing that appears small now is terminal font and xterm but that can be remedied by other means, i use xfce4s terminal the most which seems to follow my theme and DE settings quite well

good choice.
what about the icons and window decorations? did they grow, too?