And also doing it for multiple monitors with differing scales. Nobody claims X11 doesn't support different DPIs. The problems occur when you have monitors with differing pixel densities.
At the moment only Windows handles that use case perfectly, not even macOS. Wayland comes second if the optional fractional scaling is implemented by the toolkit and the compositor. I am skeptical of the Linux desktop ecosystem to do correct thing there though. Both server-side decorations and fractional scaling being optional (i.e. requires runtime opt-in from compositor and the toolkit) are missteps for a desktop protocol. Both missing features are directly attributable to GNOME and their chokehold of GTK and other core libraries.
Where does Windows handle it? It's a hodgepodge of different frameworks that often look absolutely abysmal at any scale besides 100%.
I've found the opposite, that only macOS handles that perfectly.
Windows still breaks in several situations like different size and density monitors, but it's generally good enough.
Recent Gnome on Wayland does about as well as Windows.
Speaking of X11 and Windows, any recommended Windows Xservers to add to this StackOverflow post? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61110603/how-to-set-up-w...
I hadn't heard of WSLg, vcxsrv was the best I could do for free.
This is exactly right.
There is no mechanism for the user to specify a per-screen text DPI in X11.
(Or maybe there secretly is, and i should wait for the author to show us?)
> you have monitors with differing pixel densities. At the moment only Windows handles that use case perfectly
I have a mixed DPI setup and Windows falls flat (on latest Win 11), the jank when you move a application from one monitor to another as it tells the application to redraw is horrible, and even then it sometimes fails and I end up with a cut oversized application or the app crashes.
Where as on GNOME Wayland I can resize an application to cover all my monitors and it 'just works' in making them it the same physical size on all even when one monitor is 4K and the others 1440p. There's no jank, no redraw. Yes, there's sometimes artifacting from it downscaling as the app targets the highest DPI and gets downsized by the compositor, but that's okay to me.