Wayland 1.20 Released With Proper FreeBSD Support, Protocol Additions

[RahulSundaram]

I wish there was an anchor to that, so that I can link it every time someone cops out of a discussion criticizing Wayland with the "it's just a protocol" argument.

Linking to it doesn't invalidate that notion at all. Have you looked at what tarball contains?

[Myownfriend]

Linking to it doesn't invalidate that notion at all. Have you looked at what tarball contains?

Let's be real. A lot of the people who talk about Wayland have never looked at its git and that will continue to happen. It will forever be this amalgamous thing to them that "Wayland loyalist won't let them criticize".

[lacek]

Sounds great! Always happy to see a new Wayland release.
I was hoping there would be a mention of Nvidia, since apparently it will be enabled on Fedora soon even for those of of us stuck on Nvidia cards while we wait for AMD cards to drop down about $1000. I'd get on Fedora now but I just can't tear myself away from the conveniences of Manjaro/Arch yet.

Unless you need a fancy gaming/mining/3d graphics card, you can buy RX550 for way below $1000 (around $200 actually). Surely for $200 one could normally buy a much faster card, but there are cards available for typical desktop use, that don't require used to sell his kidney.

[bug77]

Fractional scaling doesn't even work for all applications anyway and scaling of all sorts works terribly in X11 if you need mixed scaling factors.

I don't know, it works pretty well on Windows. Not to mention the proper scale is applied out-of-the-box, no user interaction needed.

[babali]

It also would still rely on application development toolkits supporting fractional scaling. For example, GTK only supports integer scaling.

Ah, GTK did it wrong then ;-)

[RahulSundaram]

Ah, GTK did it wrong then ;-)

It's more accurate to say it is not a feature that GTK implements. If you are using GNOME, you could do

$ gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"

This enabling fractional scaling at the compositor level. However if you are using GTK applications on say Windows, relying on that compositor to handling scaling instead of the toolkit itself can cause some level of blurriness.

[bug77]

Linking to it doesn't invalidate that notion at all. Have you looked at what tarball contains?

Technically, you're right.
But irl, no protocol exists as an abstraction. A reference implementation is always required. If you can't prove it works, you can put quantum processing and whatnot in a protocol. Wayland's RI is Weston, but in most discussions "Wayland" is used to refer to both

PS if statements without braces, are you kidding me?

[Myownfriend]

I don't know, it works pretty well on Windows. Not to mention the proper scale is applied out-of-the-box, no user interaction needed.

Yes Windows has it but that doesn't mean its simple or straightforward. It also doesn't just work, it still depends on the application. There's actually three possible DPI scaling modes that can be set on an a per application basis. At least one of them is for scenarios where the application doesn't support hi-dpi at all. In that case it will either scale the application with bilinear filtering like XWayland or not scale the application at all.

Windows also pops applications between scales when transitioning between monitors, an issue that, at least with Wayland on Gnome, doesn't exist.

Qt is toolkit that supports fractional scaling. It's the same toolkit used by Davinci Resolve. On Windows I needed to use the XWayland-like scaling mode with it because I needed the application to span across monitors and it was the only mode that let me do that while keeping everything legible. Dolphin uses Qt as well and I recall seeing issues they had to deal with where borders weren't showing up with fractional scaling.

[Myownfriend]

Ah, GTK did it wrong then ;-)

Rahul beat me to it. GTK doesn't do it wrong, it just doesn't do it. You're also welcome to contribute support for fractional scaling to GTK yourself since it's so trivial for you.

[babali]

Rahul beat me to it. GTK doesn't do it wrong, it just doesn't do it. You're also welcome to contribute support for fractional scaling to GTK yourself since it's so trivial for you.

Last time I've checked gtk was using cairo, and in cairo you can scale by a double factor.
I don't know everything about gtk, but in Bitwig Studio we have a fractional scaling factor per screen and it simply works. You can install and try it using flatpak com.bitwig.BitwigStudio.

There are actually a few problems holding us from supporting wayland and the fractional scaling is one of them.