Individual GNOME applications [LWN.net]

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jun 24, 2025 9:56 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Individual GNOME applications by ebee_matteo
Parent article: GNOME deepens systemd dependencies

> Certain things like HiDPI and multiple monitor setups that are expected by modern users are very difficult to add to X11.

That's news to me. I've been running X11 on my Dell XPS laptop with (very) HiDPI and plugging in and out of external monitors since I got that laptop - and it's at least a decade old. (There were HiDPI issues initially, they are largely gone - before Wayland was a useable thing).

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jun 24, 2025 16:32 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not news to me. There's still lots of programs that don't work correctly with HiDPI under X11. No, not just games.

Also, don't even think about trying to span monitors of disparate resolution with a single window.

Also² don't get me started on other silly assumptions in the X11 codebase. Simple example: Wayland thinks that negative pointer coordinates are a perfectly cromulent thing to have. Xwayland does not. You guess what happens on my monitor setup, where monitor #2 is mounted 120 pixels higher than #1.

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jul 19, 2025 14:27 UTC (Sat) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

FWIW, per the discussion starting at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_reque... , while this could be fixed in Xwayland in theory, it would be really tricky to catch all affected code. And it could likely still confuse some X clients.

Making the Wayland compositor not advertise any outputs at negative locations to Xwayland, while technically a workaround, should be a much easier solution overall.