Wayland Protocol Finally Ready For Fractional Scaling

[s_j_newbury]

VESA Adaptive Sync and AMD Freesync have been working for months on Wayland now, at least on my installs.

Kernel has a CEC driver too, GPUs tend not to have the hardware for license cost reasons. For that reason game consoles have to use a separate chip to implement CEC HDMI. GPU board makers could do the same, but I'm not aware of any doing so, am I wrong? Deep colour is also supported by DRM/KMS drivers, it's mostly not supported by DEs due to lack of application/toolkit support AFAIK. Chicken and egg.

[kiffmet]

(...) Support for VRR technologies is delivered through the Waylandcompositor (in my case Kwin), there is no support via the waylandprotocol itself.

Yes and no. KDE has it's own wayland protocols to enable VRR. These are in turn implemented by kwin, but the spec files are distributed as a separate package (plasma-wayland-protocols). The custom protocols responsible for this in KDE are:

kde-output-device-v2.xml
kde-output-management-v2.xml
outputdevice.xml
output-management.xml

and can be found in /usr/share/plasma-wayland-protocols/

[slagiewka]

benefit how? steam deck doesn't have HDR screen. in fact, its screen is pretty shitty even as an SDR screen.

Well, if you look past its builtin screen, you will see that users can still benefit from plugging the Steam Deck to a TV or a monitor ;⁠)

[Quackdoc]

YAY! this is personally one of the biggest issues I've had so far, while there's still a lot Wayland needs to catch up on, this brings its usability up a large amount. I can finally do 1.3 scaling

[Linuxhippy]

finally!

[stormcrow]

Honestly it is pretty useless(blurs the image and it doesn't bring much that just increasing the fonts won't bring to most people) but i am glad it exists so that means that all the chronic complainers will stop pestering every news article with their hate for Wayland.

Perhaps to you. But there's a hell of a lot that goes into fractional scaling beyond just having Wayland/X supporting it. This is only a first step. If any part of the chain is weak (and frankly, most of it's weak in Linux as far as fractional scaling is concerned) then the UX comes across as blurry and indistinct or proportionally unbalanced. This is why it "sucks" in Linux. The graphics stack that end users are looking at is made by different people with different goals and priorities, some of which are opposed to each other.

It's not at all "useless" on Windows or MacOS because fractional scaling Just Works. Using a 4k monitor on MacOS or WIndows is a pleasant experience even if you have visual impairments. On Linux with most window managers and DEs it's painful especially if you have visual impairments.

[Charlie68]

You honestly believe so many users have been asking for this because it's useless and they are all haters?

Surely not, but of course many users here are a bit spoiled, I don't know anyone who has a 4K monitor and I assure you I know a lot of people. However good for them ... let's say that is not really the norm.

[piotrj3]

VESA Adaptive Sync and AMD Freesync have been working for months on Wayland now, at least on my installs.

Technology if it is working yes. Same for Gsync on nvidia.

Question is, is Wayland aware of variable refresh rate. Because the way to go with VRR is render desktop at (refresh rate - 3) fps and you can drop all those buffers that wayland uses to assure there is no tearing (in case of final frame, any buffers interacting between aplication window and final composing are probably still needed).

[scottishduck]

2028 will be the year of the wayland desktop!

[skerit]

Surely not, but of course many users here are a bit spoiled, I don't know anyone who has a 4K monitor and I assure you I know a lot of people. However good for them ... let's say that is not really the norm.

It's quite a shame 4K adoption isn't going faster. I've been using it for over 5 years and can never go back.
Pair that with a high refresh rate and you're in heaven.

I wouldn't call me spoiled, just logical as someone sitting in front of a monitor 10+ hours a day.