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The thing that really made me get over the pain of switching window managers just so that I could go to Wayland was my multi monitor HiPI setup. I had high DPI

The thing that really made me get over the pain of switching window managers just so that I could go to Wayland was my multi monitor HiPI setup. I had high DPI monitors at work but two 1080p monitors at home. Switching back and forth between them on x is a huge pain because you have to change the scale factor back to one and then restart the window manager. Wayland allows me to switch the scale factor per monitor on the fly and switch back to low DPI screens. I also noticed that screen tearing went away and everything just looked better on Wayland. I used to use XFCE most of the time but I switched to KDE recently and I noticed it was a lot faster than it used to be. Plasma used to be laggy which is why I switched to XFCE but it's a lot faster now and well-behaved. The last holdout for X for me was the inability to share my screen on Zoom or Google Meet. Once PipeWire became stable, that problem went away as well, which was a huge win for my work experience. The network thing doesn't hold water for me. X11 forwarding has been useful in the past, but nowadays I find little use for it on my day to day. All that said, I believe X will never really go away, and that's a good thing. Open source means the freedom to keep on doing what works for you. Wayland will likely catch up though. A rewrite of this size was always going to be painful, but the tangible benefits for me was worth it.

jwells89 3y ago
Even on single monitor setups Wayland handles HiDPI and fractional scaling better in most circumstances, with the exception being apps that don’t support Wayland and are drawn at upscale 1x (mostly just Electron apps where the dev couldn’t be arsed to update their wrapper for some reason). HiDPI isn’t that niche of a thing anymore, having become common on upper midrange and up laptops. If only for that reason moving to Wayland makes sense. Aside from that, with X11 it wasn’t that uncommon to see cases where the layers briefly became distinguishable with things like white flashes other drawing anomalies which made for a less polished sort of hacky feel. That mostly went away when switching off compositing, but most users aren’t going to be doing that.

jwells89 3y ago

Even on single monitor setups Wayland handles HiDPI and fractional scaling better in most circumstances, with the exception being apps that don’t support Wayland and are drawn at upscale 1x (mostly just Electron apps where the dev couldn’t be arsed to update their wrapper for some reason). HiDPI isn’t that niche of a thing anymore, having become common on upper midrange and up laptops. If only for that reason moving to Wayland makes sense. Aside from that, with X11 it wasn’t that uncommon to see cases where the layers briefly became distinguishable with things like white flashes other drawing anomalies which made for a less polished sort of hacky feel. That mostly went away when switching off compositing, but most users aren’t going to be doing that.