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Comment by opine-at-random | Hacker News Reader

I think the difference is that Windows is proprietary, parasitic hate-ware that warrants changing at any cost.. and x11 is libre software that works; with well supported workflows that aren't even on the agenda for wayland development.

Also I feel like I've been waiting a decade and I still can't do fractional scaling on wayland last I checked.

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> with well supported workflows

Regardless of what you think about the general topic, xorg is not well supported anymore. People who maintained it largely work on Wayland. There aren't people available to do new releases. The workflows are still there... for now.

Supported as in the software lets you do it, rather than there's people being paid to keep the software alive, presumably. A rather lower bar.

But for that, presumably X11 will always be available? It's just that nobody has stepped up to make sure it keeps working with new hardware and software.

> Also I feel like I've been waiting a decade and I still can't do fractional scaling on wayland last I checked.

https://wayland.app/protocols/fractional-scale-v1#compositor...

Fractional scaling on X is also broken beyond repair; it (usually) only scales fonts (so not icons and other elements). Wayland does have true fractional scaling, but it's supported neither by GTK4 nor by Qt5. Qt6 is the first toolkit with true fractional scaling on Wayland.

> Also I feel like I've been waiting a decade and I still can't do fractional scaling on wayland last I checked.

Same on Windows. I have a feeling, that for some reason, the fonts and the widgets are scaled separately and then stiched together.

Windows has a lot of backwards compatibility it's necessary to support from a commercial POV, I can imagine the further back you go in their constant wheel-reinventing of GUI frameworks, the more difficult it is to patch in fractional scaling support. I've noticed the newer "metro" / tiles / win10+11 UIs look scaled natively at e.g. 125%, whilst Win32 programs have the blurry text but crisp buttons thing.

And it's confused greatly by the fact their own software appears to be layers of frameworks, eg windows explorer and the 1000 different settings apps they have..

> whilst Win32 programs have the blurry text but crisp buttons thing.

Win32 applications have to announce that they are "High DPI aware", either via a manifest file or programmatically at startup (the details have changed several times between Windows XP and Windows 10). Failing to do so results in an upscaled, blurry UI, and failing to use the latest API may result in some features not working (such as automatic adjustment when moving a window between monitors with different DPI).

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