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by WhyNotHugo 94 days ago
My reason for switching from i3 to sway (about 8 years ago) is DPI support. High DPI is a pain in Xorg, and essentially impossible with heterogeneous monitors.

The migration was a one way thing. Lots of things are smoother and simpler, and not having to ever again touch Xorg.conf has improved my quality of life.

To this day, I still have different monitors with different scale factors.
2 comments
imiric 94 days ago
> not having to ever again touch Xorg.conf has improved my quality of life

I haven't touched xorg.conf in decades. I suppose you might have to do it to configure some unique setup, but for me this hasn't been an issue in a long time.

Now with Wayland, instead of having to touch a single config file, we have to learn how each compositor/WM is configured, and do it there instead. It hardly seems like an improvement in that regard, IMO.

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WhyNotHugo 91 days ago
> Now with Wayland, instead of having to touch a single config file, we have to learn how each compositor/WM is configured, and do it there instead.

Not really. I only need to know how to configure the compositor which I use. I don't need to know how to configure all the other compositors, in the same way I didn't know how to configure all the existing Xorg window managers.

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somat 93 days ago
The funny thing is that X11 can actually do heterogeneous dpi and Wayland can't.

Unfortunately you will never find yourself in a situation to actually use a mixed dpi X11 setup (you lose your homogeneous desktop) and Wayland is better at spoofing it (for whatever reason fractional scaling works better in Wayland).

http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/

My favorite quote from that writeup.

"If you think this idea is a bit stupid, shed a tear for the future of the display servers: this same mechanism is essentially how Wayland compositors —Wayland being the purported future replacement for X— cope with mixed-DPI setups."

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Nursie 93 days ago
Yeah I've done that, I used my linux box for years with a 24" 1920x1200 screen and a 32" 4k screen next to each other.

Doing some basic mathematics and xrandr command-line wizardry to apply scaling factors to each display, I was able to get Xorg to render to a virtual framebuffer and treat the monitors as appropriately scaled windows onto it, so that dragging applications from one screen to the other didn't result in any noticeable change in size.

Worked pretty well.

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