You guys must be using some different X11 than the rest of us.

Basically, with X11 and hidpi, all you can do is to set up the system to announce dpi with certain value and hope, that the clients will cope. Some can (I know of exactly two of them: Chrome and Firefox), others will up bump up the font size and hopefully are using a layout, so the window sizes will adjust to accommodate the textboxes, but all the non-text assets will stay low-res how they were, because they do not have any other. Apps for remote desktop access or vm console won't be able to display remote/vm correctly. And the rest will just ignore that and you get tiny stuff on the display.

And this is just the hidpi issue with single display. Won't go into the problems when running with multiple displays, with different dpi.

I also do not have a faintest idea of what "setting up Wayland" might mean. What did you set up? How? The only thing that needs to "set up" is to pick a wayland session in the display manager. There's no xorg.conf for wayland, setting up drivers, etc. What did you configure "for hours"?

I've been using 4K 27" for over a decade, and Wayland, since Fedora made it default. Since I have no 20-year old xdotool scripts, or others that inject events or try to grab pixmaps, I've had no problem.

It's possible there might be a misunderstanding as to what "working" means. For me, if there's vaseline anywhere on my screen, that's strictly worse than tiny fonts I need a magnifying glass for. I'd rather have no scaling than nearest neighbour interpolation.

> You guys must be using some different X11 than the rest of us.

Speak for yourself, I know plenty of people who are able to get non-96-DPI working on X with just Xft.dpi and some environment variables.

> Some can (I know of exactly two of them: Chrome and Firefox), others will up bump up the font size and hopefully are using a layout, so the window sizes will adjust to accommodate the textboxes, but all the non-text assets will stay low-res how they were, because they do not have any other.

This is an application bug (non text assets not getting scaled up) and will hardly be fixed with anything other than vaseline the text and icons on an equivalently non-DPI-change supporting application on wayland.

The vast majority of modern software works just fine.

> Apps for remote desktop access or vm console won't be able to display remote/vm correctly.

Does Wayland solve this in any other way other than to vaseline it all up? xfreerdp has /scale. When it comes to VMs I use through spice you just set their DPI settings individually to match your host, then you get nice scaling without vaseline. AFAIK in wayland this all gets vaselined.

> And this is just the hidpi issue with single display. Won't go into the problems when running with multiple displays, with different dpi.

Don't run multiple displays with different DPI. It's an unsolvable problem in the X11/Wayland ecosystem. You need to keep everything as postscript or something equivalent all the way up until the point you know which monitor it's rendered on.

Of all the things Wayland could have actually gone out and fixed, this is one they eschewed in favour of "ah screw it, just give all the applications some graphics buffers and let them figure it out".

> I also do not have a faintest idea of what "setting up Wayland" might mean. What did you set up? How? The only thing that needs to "set up" is to pick a wayland session in the display manager. There's no xorg.conf for wayland, setting up drivers, etc. What did you configure "for hours"?

I know exactly what guilhas means.

Some people are not content with Ubuntu Gnome at a integer scaling factor, they're running highly bespoke setups where everything from the display manager to the screen-grab stuff is customized or custom written. So you spend a lot of time and effort switching to sway, switching to wayland, switching to wayland native versions of a terminal, fixing firefox so it starts in wayland mode, fiddling with the nonsensical scaling settings to actually get firefox to render at the right size, figuring out how to get your screenshot binding to work again, figuring out how to get all your applications to start in the right version, being dismayed when something which still uses X11 runs in XWayland and looks like vaseline because of weird design decisions which are incomprehensible (meanwhile that same application with Xft.dpi set to the right value renders flawlessly).

Eventually you get it all back up and running and you play with it for a week and you spot 20 things which subtly work differently or outright break, you spend hours looking for a solution to only get half of it working.

Right now wayland works mostly fine for the Ubuntu Gnome user or the Kubuntu user (except issues getting non-integer scaling factors working or issues with things needing XWayland) but it's nowhere near as easy to get up and running for someone running a non-standard setup.