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Comment by kabwj | Hacker News Reader

Can Wayland currently handle several monitors with different DPI? And by “handle” I mean, being able to resize (blurry, I know) windows that are not DPI-aware transparently when I move them between monitors. What Windows has been able to do for years now.

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It’s not Wayland’s job, as I understand. GTK3 does it, I think Qt does it, and I’m not sure about anything else. Firefox has issues with menu positioning but works fine. Because X11 applications still talk using the X protocol to XWayland, which doesn’t handle DPI scaling, there’s no guarantee of it working.

Applications (and their toolkits) should be able to signal to Wayland whether they can handle DPI scaling or not, and if they can’t, Wayland should forcibly resize the windows (ie paint them bigger) like Windows does.

If something as basic as this doesn’t work...

Do you realize that Wayland is a protocol and it involves a compositor (which is NOT called Wayland)?

Yes. Note that this isn't really possible with X11.

It would have been possible if Wayland decided to include drawing primitives. They religiously decided against it.

Now every toolkit has to somehow manage dpi scaling by itself. Actually it is a huge mess.

> They religiously decided against it.

They decided against it because no one (except maybe xterm) was using X11's drawing APIs anymore. The whole point of Wayland is to get rid of all the unused legacy that lingers in X11.

People didn't use X11's drawing API because it is severely limited (no transparency, no anti aliasing) and not because they are inherently a bad idea.

Both Windows and MacOS come with their own primitives that are widely used.

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