[orangeboats]

> What you actually want to do is just use real pixels everywhere and just tell the client "here's your NxM window size and it will be displayed in a X scale"

This is already how the Wayland fractional scaling protocol works. You have a 100x60 window and Wayland tells you the scale is 1.5. You give Wayland a 150x90 framebuffer and call it a day.

The giant problem with X11 is that it is still making the assumption that everything is one giant screen -- even if you have multiple monitors and whatnot. Even the act of sending a scaling event like Wayland does is a challenge on X11.

[pedrocr]

Wayland has gotten it right in the latest protocols but up to very recently it still did only integer scaling and scaled down for fractional. Scaling the buffer in fake coordinates is also needlessly complex. Just start with the 150x90 buffer to begin with and the scaling is just a UI hint. All of that would work fine with X11 exactly because there's no need for fake coordinates. All scaling is the client's job based on a DPI or scale hint.