And color calibration.
>such as different HiDPI across multiple monitors
I had this working with multiple X11 servers 20 years ago.
>And that has changed in the past 2 years
I was told that exact same line 5 years ago. I guess it will be just as true in 5 years again.
Wayland doesn't have all the features we'd like it to have yet, it's missing some big things like global hotkeys and color management. It's not moving as fast as I'd like, but all those things are being actively worked on.
X11 also doesn't have all the features we'd like it to have, such as the ability to render frames without tearing or the ability to lock the screen while a context menu is open or the ability to implement a desktop environment without a ton of race conditions. Those things are not being worked on, and X11 will actually regress as new hardware is released and developers don't focus on hacking X11 to work with that hardware.
For a lot of users (such as myself), Wayland is already better than X; there's a reason lots of distros ship Wayland by default now. The situation is certainly way better now than it was 5 years ago.
But that doesn't mean you have to use it! It's ready for you when it's ready for you, and maybe X's wonkyness doesn't annoy you or you've learned to hack around it (congrats on getting different DPI scaling on different monitors to work! I haven't, despite struggling with it. I didn't even know DPI scaling was a thing 20 years ago. Anyway, it worked out of the box on Wayland.)
What exactly do you mean? My Xorg setup can render frames without tearing just fine, both in video playback (VLC) and in games.
TBH i don't really care about tearing (since it tends to come with input lag even on desktop usage) aside from videos, so i haven't looked much into it. However people are working on tearing in Xorg - see the latest commits by Sultan Alsawaf on the xfree86 subtree[0] (which is the standalone X server). Specifically this[1] commit adds a "TearFree" page flip mode in the modesetting driver for not having any sort of tearing at any setup.
[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/commits/master...
[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/commit/a94dd95...
Note that i do have tearing in the desktop if i -e.g.- move windows around, but this is something i want as i do not like the slight input lag compositors add (even on my 165Hz monitor). However there isn't any tearing in VLC or in games (which, depending on the game, i might also run with VRR).
AFAIK the modesetting driver got VRR support only recently and the TearFree mode only just a few months ago so if you used that you might have used some older version.
Though if you tried a compositor, i don't remember using any compositor that didn't do some form of vsync to avoid tearing. I just started KDE Plasma with Xorg in another virtual terminal with its compositor and default settings (i started it as a different user with default settings that i sometimes use for testing) and there wasn't any tearing at all even on the desktop (again using the amdgpu driver).
People want to move windows between their screens.
The lack of proper HiDPI support was really starting to become a problem when trying to run Linux on a laptop that isn't from the early 2000s. Fortunately, with wayland, it now seems mostly solved (at least in Gnome and KDE).
Yes, you use he fact x is a network server and run each screen as a separate client.
X doesn't like this. Wayland works much better.
You had to hack around X11's shorttcomings.
X11 does not support HiDPI or multiple DPI across multiple monitors without hacks and workarounds. Wayland does. That makes X a non-starter and Wayland the only choice for many users.
Wayland has clearly chosen a set of trade-offs that are far superior for a lot of users and I fully expect anybody sticking with X11 to gradually become more and more of an outlier over time, and that's entirely fine by me.
(I use fvwm2 with a sub-40 line config that starts by turning almost all the usual features off, plain xterm, and heirloom vi, I'm already perfectly used to being an outlier and so long as I can coax it all into keeping working I don't see any reason to complain that lots of other people prefer to use things from this century instead ;)
https://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc https://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png
That gives me a 3x3 X11 screen of my actual screen size with the laptop screen acting as a scrolling viewport, keyboard shortcuts to jump one screen or one xterm's worth of screen at once (the xterms are launched pre-tiled by a script, I like that layout but I don't get on with tiling window managers) and rely heavily on focus follows mouse to be able to e.g. type into a window that's mostly covered by another one that I'm reading stuff from as I type.
Plus I'm currently running VcXsrv in full screen mode on a Windows 10 install connecting to WSL2 over local TCP, though so long as I can get "Alt-Tab to a full screen session with no windows title bar/etc. taking up space" -somehow- I'm not really tied to the X11 protocol, I'm looking at switching over to RDP anyway (and would accept VNC, I already use that for remoting to Debian and FreeBSD system out on t'internet but the full screen experience tends to be a tad inelegant at least with the client configs I've tried to date).
Now, if those both sound like they's at least -doable- with anything up to, say, a moderate amount of pain with Windows 10 acting as a client to all of WSL2 Debian, a 'real' debian install, and FreeBSD, I'm happy to endure lots of RTFM and some faffing to get there, but last time I tried I ended up at "either this isn't really possible yet or I've completely failed to find the correct FMs to R to figure it out."
If anybody has a minute, a reply to the effect of "yeah, not yet" or "here's what you should've read to realise it is actually possible and not -too- painful so long as you read all of these links carefully" would be appreciated and I'll go do the reading and try and find time to try it out (probably with the FreeBSD system as the thing running the RDP/VNC/whatever server first since I want to move my main firefox instance there) ... but I'm very much aware that my preferences and workflow are kinda weird and there are almost certainly higher ROI things for the relevant contributors to be spending their time on so I'm pretty comfortable with "Wayland should probably be the present or at least near future for most people but I may be staying on X11 for a while yet" as a situation :)
(yes, I know, but it all works for me)
I myself was not a fan of wayland either, due to a bunch of functionality removed which I use in my workflow, and will stick with XOrg until XFCE forces me to switch to Wayland.
There's a lot of churn in the Linux ecosystem, and some are going to be better received than others. I didn't see the point in Wayland (but I'm not a maintainer of XOrg code to understand how bad the codebase is), I see the principle behind ideas like Flatpak (although not sure if they have a good sandboxing story now, but they sure have their GBs of layers), but when it comes to pipewire, for example, I'm very happy that it exists.