GNOME On Wayland Screencasting Is About To Be A Heck Of A Lot More Efficient

[pracedru]

Awesome.
Now we just need some Nvidia drivers that work with Wayland!!!

[treba]

KDE still has a lot of work to do with their Wayland implementation, but they are making progress. In the past it was so bad that it would become unusable after a short time, and when you tried to change back to Xorg you would find that your profile has been screwed up. But I tried it again just a few days ago and it does seem to be much improved. Still not quite ready yet though. However, Plasma's Wayland mode does something interesting that I don't see in Gnome or even Windows. If you take two monitors, one 4K with scaling at 200% and the other 1080P at 100%, you can drag an app window half way between both monitors and the app appears the same size on both of them. In other implementations, what would happen is as the app moves from the 4K to the 1080P screen, the app would appear extremely large on the 1080P screen until the majority of the app has moved to the 1080P screen. At that point, the app would resize to appear normal on the 1080P screen, but look extremely small on the 4K screen. Somehow, Plasma seamlessly shows the app at 200% scaling on one monitor and 100% scaling on the other monitor - both at the same time.

In Gnome that's called stage view scaling / fractional scaling (can be activated by setting 'scale-monitor-framebuffer' in experimental features in Mutter). It's still an experimental feature because hidpi X11 clients look blurry - in plasma they accepted that. There is work on getting XWayland to properly support that, too, but it will be hard to get right (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/...e_requests/111)

Edit: well there are some issues until fractional scaling is deemed production ready, but XWayland blurriness is the main one.