If that's not a problem you have then great! But most people today are using multiple monitors.
Just out of curiosity, what was complex about your quad 4k monitor configuration? As a lark, I've used xrandr to do all sorts of weird stuff and it has handled it just fine.
I've been using multiple monitors with xorg for fifteen, twenty years. (For quite a while, I used three monitors, but now I just have two.) Until XRandR became a thing, configuring them was definitely a headache, but after its release, everything Just Works(TM).
On my laptops, I've always used Intel hardware, and on my desktop, I've always used ATi/AMD hardware. Are you -perhaps- using nVidia hardware? If you are, that may be the source of your problems... nVidia's Linux support for the little things that make using a graphical desktop not tear-your-hair-out bad has always been pretty awful. (Usually because they typically refuse to do what everyone else does and go off and make an incompatible version that's generally worse.)
I think it's on the verge of being impossible to be honest. If you don't need any scaling then yeah, xrandr is fine. I ran 4 24" monitors, 2 horizontal and 2 vertical and xrandar handles it just fine.
> I think it's on the verge of being impossible to be honest.
You sure about that? QT seems to handle per-monitor scaling fine (at least with 'kwin'), so it doesn't seem to be at all a problem with xorg. Read on:
QT has environment variables that let you set per-monitor scaling... even fractional scaling. See: <https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/highdpi.html#high-dpi-support-in-qt>
On my system, I have two monitors, DisplayPort-0 (a 32" 4k) and DisplayPort-1 (a 24" 1200p). I also have Dolphin installed, and it has a "Desktop" item in its sidebar that has a "minimal" square-cornered icon. When I run:
QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS='DisplayPort-0=2.73;DisplayPort-1=1' dolphin &
QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS='DisplayPort-0=2.60;DisplayPort-1=1' dolphin &
And, when I move Dolphin to the DisplayPort-1 monitor, once more than half of the window is on DP-1, the icons shrink to 16x16, and scale back up when I move back to DP-0.
Now, for some reason neither 'QT_ENABLE_HIGHDPI_SCALING' nor 'QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR' seem to do anything at all. Given that xrandr knows the physical size of each monitor, and how many pixels each is configured to output, my expectation is that they simply never wired this up when running on xorg. I wonder if they're accepting patches.
EDIT: I also wonder if the reason they never wired this up when running with xorg is because nVidia's scaling performance is absolute dogshit, and they (somewhat reasonably) really want to have this autoscaling stuff on by default.
I had a similar problem to what the sibling comment mentioned - scaling was causing me performance issues. I disabled the laptop monitor and just ran multiple screens of the same resolution, and need about 150 % scaling to have text visible on these 4 X 32 inch 4 K monitors, but it was causing a huge amount of lag in xorg. It was solved by switching to Wayland which reduced the lag completely, and also let me run fractional scaling (I think I use 135 %) which wasn't available in xorg. I spent a lot of time with combinations of drivers and inputs and docks and scaling and couldn't get xorg to work. The laptop is a dell precision 3580 with a 4 GB NVIDIA gpu so a pretty standard piece of hardware
Your sibling didn't mention any performance issues at all. And yeah, nonsense like that sounds par for the course for nVidia hardware.
In re: per-monitor and also fractional scaling, check out what I played around with today: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40437217>
EDIT: Oh, and yeah, your multi-monitor setup sounds not even a little bit complex. Four or more monitors on Xorg? Easy as pie, when you've not made the mistake of using nVidia hardware.
I don't think that's really true. Most devs, maybe, but even then I'm doubtful.