[zozbot234]

The real issue is that people want to be able to smoothly drag windows across monitors. This requires that each window be able to switch to a different DPI scaling when its "home" monitor changes. Something must also be done to deal with a single window being displayed across monitors with different resolution (which is what happens while dragging) though hardware scaling is probably acceptable there at some minor loss in quality - the "proper" alternative is to render natively at both resolutions, but applications might not natively support that.

[eru]

My Macbook doesn't (always) drag smoothly across monitors. And I don't think anyone really complains about it?

[delta_p_delta_x]

This works seamlessly on Windows. My 1920×1080 15.6-inch laptop display is at 125%, and my 3840×2160 27-inch monitor is at 175%. Move a window between both, and the size automatically snaps to whichever monitor contains more than 50% of the window.

[arghwhat]

That isn't seamless - windows has many different was to handle HiDPI, and for a few of them, the window will violently change size as it moves across and will look completely wrong on the "unmatched" monitor, to the point of being completely useless on that monitor (way too big to see anything or way too small to read anything).

What Wayland is doing is making it so the window looks the same size on all screens, with the source matching the primary or highest dpi monitor, and the composite scaling the content to match other monitors. This makes it equally useful on all monitors, at the cost of non-primary monitors having lower clarity.

macOS handles it well by cheating: a window can only be shown on one monitor at any given time. Only while moving a window will it temporarily be allowed to be seen on two monitors at once.

[adgjlsfhk1]

counterpoint: a little bit of cheating here is not a bad thing.