Love this post. Reminds me of my former coworker G. He had exactly this attitude, and it made it possible for him to deliver results on most tasks that he set out for.
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No one with a good grasp of the space ever claimed that it wasn't possible on X11 to call into APIs to retrieve physical display size and map that to how many pixels to render. This has been possible for decades, and while not completely trivial is not the hard part about doing good UI scaling.
Doing good UI scaling requires infrastructure for dynamic scaling changes, for different scale factors per display within the same scene, for guaranteeing crisp hairlines at any scale factor, and so on and so forth.
Many of these problems could have been solved in X11 with additional effort, and some even made it to partial solutions available. The community simply chose to put its energy into bringing it all together in the Wayland stack instead.
KDE developer wrote recently:
> X11 isn’t able to perform up to the standards of what people expect today with respect to .., 10 bits-per-color monitors,.. multi-monitor setups (especially with mixed DPIs or refresh rates),... [1]
Multi-monitor setups are working since 20+ years. 10 bits are also supported (otherwise how would the PRO versions of graphic cards support this feature).
> chose to put its energy into bringing it all together in
I cannot recall, was there any paper analyzing why working and almost working X11 features do not fit, few additional X11 extensions cannot be proposed anymore and another solution from scratch is inevitable. What is a significant difference of a X11 and a wayland protocol extension.
[1] https://pointieststick.com/2025/06/21/about-plasmas-x11-sess...