Wayland in KDE
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John Goerzen: A Maze of Twisty Little Pixels, All Tiny
Two years ago, I wrote Managing an External Display on Linux Shouldn’t Be This Hard. Happily, since I wrote that post, most of those issues have been resolved.
But then you throw HiDPI into the mix and it all goes wonky.
If you’re running X11, basically the story is that you can change the scale factor, but it only takes effect on newly-launched applications (which means a logout/in because some of your applications you can’t really re-launch). That is a problem if, like me, you sometimes connect an external display that is HiDPI, sometimes not, or your internal display is HiDPI but others aren’t. Wayland is far better, supporting on-the-fly resizes quite nicely.
I’ve had two devices with HiDPI displays: a Surface Go 2, and a work-issued Thinkpad. The Surface Go 2 is my ultraportable Linux tablet. I use it sparingly at home, and rarely with an external display. I just put Gnome on it, in part because Gnome had better on-screen keyboard support at the time, and left it at that.
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Using compositor handoff to switch between desktops
In the video we can see applications seamlessly move between Plasma, Gnome, Weston, Hyprland and Sway as part of the wayland robustness project.