Are We Wayland Yet?

My biggest annoyance at this stage is a few blurry apps when using fractional scaling. Eg Calibre & GIMP.

But I don't think that's Wayland's fault - it's up to those apps to upgrade their UI libraries (which might be a monumental task, I'm not sure).

I know GIMP is working towards GTK3 and hopefully that fixes the issue.

As for Calibre. It uses PyQT. Does anyone know if PyQT supports fractional scaling now? And what it would take for something like Calibre to upgrade to a newer PyQT version?

> But I don't think that's Wayland's fault - it's up to those apps to upgrade their UI libraries (which might be a monumental task, I'm not sure).

Actually, it is Wayland's fault[0], and arguably Xorg is able to handle it better[1].

Basically, the protocol doesn't currently support sending a fraction as the scale to the application, so whenever you've got displays with DPIs that are not integer multiples of one another, the compositor will scale down on at least one of those displays, causing blur. In Xorg, it is normal for applications to simply detect the DPI of the display they're on and render accordingly. In either case, it requires support from the graphical framework used by the application (eg, Qt applications seem to automatically handle this on Xorg).

I would quite like to replace one of my monitors in a multi-monitor setup with a HiDPI one, but lack of support for this is what's holding me back. I'd be happy enough if Firefox just added support to Xorg for DPI detection[2], though if Wayland gets this working first, I'll probably switch over to that (I've gone back and forth between Xorg/xmonad and Wayland/sway, and I don't really see any other blockers for me).

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/lficfe/wayland_fractio...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1679335

This is currently working fine for me with the wayland backend (not xwayland) on Firefox in sway. The details escape me but I think it started working properly since a release during the past ~6-9 months.

BTW, as a fellow long-time xmonad user who never managed to get fully used to the i3/sway tiling model I've been very happy so far switching to Qtile on my X11 machine. Took a couple of hours to replicate my decade-of-custom-crust Xmonad setup and another couple to add some new nice stuff I either wasn't able to or never bothered with (scratchpad/dropdowns for my top 5 frequently used apps like chat,pavucontrol,music,dashboards has already been a productivity improvement).

It seems to be on good track to work well in native Wayland mode as well, meaning we can have the same WM on both :)

Right, the effective DPI switching works for Firefox on Wayland, but like all other applications on Wayland, fractional scaling will result in blurriness. I was looking into this less than 6 months ago, and I don't see any relevant updates since then and can see various other recent reports of the same issue.

The main applications I use are Firefox and some terminal emulator, so I would be happy as long as I can get both of those working using fractional scaling on either of Wayland/Xorg (without downscale blurring).

It doesn't work in Wayland due to limitations in the protocol and it doesn't work in Xorg simply because Firefox haven't implemented it there (and they seem to have closed the issue as WONTFIX, telling people to use Wayland instead, which has this issue that GGP raised).

It does work specifically in Xorg in Qt applications, though I don't actively use any of those.

output $MONITOR scale 1.25 in sway; no blurriness.

IIRC the only thing I eventually did to make things work was setting env vars

  MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
  MOZ_WAYLAND_USE_VAAPI=1

(You probably already know this but check `window protocol` under about:config and/or use the xeyes method to verify that it's indeed not falling back to Xwayland. I mention this because any time I experienced blurriness, Xwayland's been in the loop and xeyes is a quick way to check that for any app)

As for terminals: foot has some weird behavior with font sizes[0] but kitty and alacritty have not had surprises here so far (though I didn't try alacritty in multi-DPI situation yet)

[0]: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/issues/714