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Wayland Protocol Finally Ready for Fractional Scaling

phoronix.com

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Re: Wayland Protocol Finally Ready for Fractional Scaling

#11

Post by vbezhenar »

Aardwolf wrote: post #3

I still use X11, where and rely on the following features (amongst others): -taking screenshots -auto keyboard/mouse scripting with xdotool -not have unnecessary mouse/keyboard to monitor delay -4K fullscreen, windowed fullscreen and windowed gaming with nvidia drivers, for native and steam proton games -choosing to have vsync enabled or disabled in games -EDIT: I should another important one for me: xclip, read from…

Screenshots work. No idea what xdotool is. Did not feel any delay. Not sure about games, Factorio works fine with Intel GPU. Not sure about vsync either.

Re: Wayland Protocol Finally Ready for Fractional Scaling

#13

Post by Ericson2314 »

I once tried bringing this up in the discussion, but I believe this protocol still works with some sort of "logic pixels" abstraction. And there is concern about rounding.

If rounding / scaling artifacts are avoidable, this is fine. On the other hand if this stuff occurs in practice like with macOS (at least at one point, with the 2x render and downscale), this is totally fucked.

Wayland is much more low level than, say, CSS. So I see zero problem if the scaling factor can instead be a black box which applications are familiar to treat however they like. This is how "*.dpi: 120" in a .Xresources file works, for example. Not all applications might be able to support fractional scaling, but those that do can do it perfectly without any risk of scaling artifacts.

This was repeatedly rejected for reasons that I don't understand.

Re: Wayland Protocol Finally Ready for Fractional Scaling

#14

Post by RealStickman_ »

Aardwolf wrote: post #3

I still use X11, where and rely on the following features (amongst others): -taking screenshots -auto keyboard/mouse scripting with xdotool -not have unnecessary mouse/keyboard to monitor delay -4K fullscreen, windowed fullscreen and windowed gaming with nvidia drivers, for native and steam proton games -choosing to have vsync enabled or disabled in games -EDIT: I should another important one for me: xclip, read from…

Have you tried ydotool as a replacement for xdotool? It also works on X, as it uses uinput.

https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

Re: Wayland Protocol Finally Ready for Fractional Scaling

#15

Post by pmontra »

boudin wrote: post #7
Aardwolf wrote: post #3

I still use X11, where and rely on the following features (amongst others): -taking screenshots -auto keyboard/mouse scripting with xdotool -not have unnecessary mouse/keyboard to monitor delay -4K fullscreen, windowed fullscreen and windowed gaming with nvidia drivers, for native and steam proton games -choosing to have vsync enabled or disabled in games -EDIT: I should another important one for me: xclip, read from…

Taking screenshot just works, there's a fair amount of tools for it. The one difference is that some tools are compositor specific. I know there's automation tools like xdottool, never used those though. I never saw much difference in term of delay, I find playing on wayland better, some games being much smoother even when using xwayland. I have AMD hardware only so can't say here. There's a procol being worked on to…

> There's a procol being worked on to allow tearing

The irony, to say the least.

Re: Wayland Protocol Finally Ready for Fractional Scaling

#17

Post by maskros »

edent wrote: post #5
Aardwolf wrote: post #3

I still use X11, where and rely on the following features (amongst others): -taking screenshots -auto keyboard/mouse scripting with xdotool -not have unnecessary mouse/keyboard to monitor delay -4K fullscreen, windowed fullscreen and windowed gaming with nvidia drivers, for native and steam proton games -choosing to have vsync enabled or disabled in games -EDIT: I should another important one for me: xclip, read from…

I use Wayland and it has screenshot and screen recording tools. I don't notice any delay on keyboard or mouse entry across multiple monitors. Can't answer the rest.

He is referring to input lag: the delay from input to visible change on the monitor. The double buffering and compositor step added by Wayland adds some delay.

You may not personally notice it, or be used to it, but it's always there. Some people are more bothered by input lag than others, and there are so many compounding factors today that make it worse than ever. It's not only the double buffering in graphics subsystems like Wayland. Monitors are also often adding a frame or two delay to bump up their pixel "response times" and reduce ghosting by looking at future frames.

I swear, using Wayland or MacOS or Windows 10 on the fastest hardware today still feels slower and laggier than 10 year old hardware running plain X11 or Windows 7 (with the compositor turned off).

Given the choice between tearing and input lag, I'll take tearing any day.

Re: Wayland Protocol Finally Ready for Fractional Scaling

#18

Post by grepfru_it »

bluedino wrote: post #12

I was going to say something about it being 10 years now since Apple made high DPI screens mainstream. Windows still doesn't have it working 100% yet.

Hmm maybe I'm missing something but I have not had any scaling problems in Windows. Maybe an argument could be made that adjusting DPI is as easy as MacOS as of Win 11 (maybe Win 10 too but I didn't use Windows too much then), but I've never had a problem increasing scaling on any of my 4k screens

Re: Wayland Protocol Finally Ready for Fractional Scaling

#19

Post by LeonM »

Aardwolf wrote: post #3

I still use X11, where and rely on the following features (amongst others): -taking screenshots -auto keyboard/mouse scripting with xdotool -not have unnecessary mouse/keyboard to monitor delay -4K fullscreen, windowed fullscreen and windowed gaming with nvidia drivers, for native and steam proton games -choosing to have vsync enabled or disabled in games -EDIT: I should another important one for me: xclip, read from…

> choosing to have vsync enabled or disabled in games

Good news: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-Tearing-Control-Proto

> Introduced now with Wayland Protocols 1.30 though is a new staging protocol to allow screen tearing.

Re: Wayland Protocol Finally Ready for Fractional Scaling

#20

Post by enriquto »

Aardwolf wrote: post #3

I still use X11, where and rely on the following features (amongst others): -taking screenshots -auto keyboard/mouse scripting with xdotool -not have unnecessary mouse/keyboard to monitor delay -4K fullscreen, windowed fullscreen and windowed gaming with nvidia drivers, for native and steam proton games -choosing to have vsync enabled or disabled in games -EDIT: I should another important one for me: xclip, read from…

> I still use X11, where and rely on the following features

To which I would add:

(1) taking screenshots from the command line (xwd)

(2) moving windows around from the command line (xwit)

(3) keyboard-free copy-paste between different programs: select to copy, middle-click to paste

(4) global indicator of where my cursor is (xeyes)

(5) define global key combinations that launch programs (xbindkeys)

(6) globally configure the keyboard in a particular way, key by key, not according to some pre-configured "language" (setxkbmap, xmodmap, xkbset)

(7) set keyboard repeat/delay to absurdly unusable values (xset)

(8) run graphical programs from a headless virtual machine (ssh -X)

I do not mind whether I'm running x11 or wayland, but I care a lot for all these features that are crucial to my workflow. How likely is it that items (1)--(8) will be supported somehow under wayland?

I'm a bit concerned that wayland gives a lot of attention to things that are meaningless to me (tearing, scaling, etc), and does not care at all about these basic usability features.

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