- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- technews@radiation.party
In response to Wayland Breaks Your Bad Software
I say that the technical merits are irrelevant because I don’t believe that they’re a major factor any more in most people moving or not moving to Wayland.
With only a slight amount of generalization, none of these people will be moved by Wayland’s technical merits. The energetic people who could be persuaded by technical merits to go through switching desktop environments or in some cases replacing hardware (or accepting limited features) have mostly moved to Wayland already. The people who remain on X are there either because they don’t want to rebuild their desktop environment, they don’t want to do without features and performance they currently have, or their Linux distribution doesn’t think their desktop should switch to Wayland yet.
It’s really not “working” per se. VRR was breaking on X11, sandboxing was breaking on X11, fractional scaling and mixed DPI were breaking on X11.
How did we achieve HiDPI on X11? By changing Xft.dpi (breaking old things) or adding random environment variables (terrible UX - do you want to worsen Linux desktop’s reputation even more?). Changing XRandR? May your battery life be long lasting.
There’s genuinely no good way to mix different DPIs on the same X server, even with only one screen! On Windows and Mac, the old LoDPI applications are scaled up automatically by the compositor, but this just doesn’t exist on X11.
I focus on DPI because this is a huge weakness of X11 and there is a foreseeable trend of people using HiDPI monitors more and more, there are tons of other weaknesses, but people tend to sweep them under the rug as being exotic. And please don’t call HiDPI setups exotic. For all the jokes we see on the eternal 768p screens that laptop manufacturers like to use, the mainstream laptops are moving onto 1080p. On a 13" screen, shit looks tiny if you don’t scale it up by 150%.
You can hate on Wayland, you may work on an alternative called Delaware for all I care, but let’s admit that X11 doesn’t really work anymore and is not the future of Linux desktop.
Outside of your fantasies high DPI works fine. Modern QT apps seem to pick it up fairly automatically now and GTK does indeed require a variable which could trivially be set for the user.
Your desktop relies on a wide variety of env variables to function correctly which doesn’t bother you because they are set for you. This has literally worked fine for me for years. I have no idea what you think you are talking about. Wayland doesn’t work AT ALL for me out of the box without ensuring some variables are set because my distro doesn’t do that for me this doesn’t mean Wayland is broken.
They pick up “automatically” because of how your DE sets up the relevant envvars for you, there is nothing in the protocol that actually tells the applications “hey, this monitor needs X% DPI scaling!”.
The side effect of this deficiency in the protocol is very obvious, you can’t mix DPIs, because the envvars or Xft.dpi are global and not per-application. Have you seen a blurry LoDPI X11 window sitting right beside a HiDPI X11 window? Or an X11 window changing its DPI dynamically as you move it across monitors with different DPIs?
The fact that SDL2 still doesn’t support HiDPI on X11 when it already does on Macs, Windows, and Linux Wayland should tell you something.
Don’t throw the “it works for me” excuse on me. Because I can throw it back on you too: “Wayland works on my machine”. X11 is utterly broken, just admit it. You are welcome to develop another X11 if you want.
Why on earth would I develop “another X11” instead of using the one that still works perfectly fine?
So you simply thought the deficiencies I listed before are not problematic. Got it, have a nice day.
Nothing is set automatically I run a window manager and it starts what I tell it to start. I observed that at present fewer env variables are now required to obtain proper scaling. I did not personally dig into the reasoning for same because frankly its an implementation detail. I just noted that qt apps like dolphin and calibre are scaled without benefit of configuration while GTK apps like Firefox don’t work without GDK_SCALE set.
X actually exposes both the resolution and physical size of displays. This gives you the DPI if you happen to have mastered basic math. I’ve no idea if this is in fact used but your statement NOTHING provides that is trivially disprovable by runing xrandr --verbose. It is entirely possible that its picking up on the globally set DPI instead which in this instance would yield the exact same result because and wait for it.
You don’t in fact actually even need apps to be aware of different DPI or dynamically adjust you may scale everything up to the exact same DPI and let X scale it down to the physical resolution. This doesn’t result in a blurry screen. The 1080p screen while not as pretty as the higher res screens looks neither better nor worse than it looks without scaling.
Why would I need to develop another X11 I believe I shall go on using this one which already supported high and mixed DPI just fine when Wayland was a steaming pile of shit nobody in their right mind would use. It probably actually supported it when you yourself were in elementary school.
You seems to have dealt with windows recentely.
Regarding linux on desktop… as long as you don’t involve smelly gamers, it’s perfectly fine.
I have been daily-driving Linux for years, but I do boot into Windows from time to time. Even then, I recognize that the out-of-the-box experience of Linux desktop isn’t as good as it can be, although it’s been rapidly improving.