Having custom resolution support is INCREDIBLY important for them, because they have no native resolution and you can just throw pretty much anything at them and it looks fantastic. It’s great for getting high refresh rates in games, especially since decreasing the resolution means you don’t have to work as hard for that framerate, without the nastiness of upscaling.
And also our monitor reports 1280x1024 as the highest resolution. Which… is the wrong aspect ratio. ??? So we NEED custom resolutions to even have a usable monitor.
KDE finally came out with support for this… in a version that’s not in Debian yet… like, one major release before dropping X11 support completely. And pretty much every other desktop on the planet is just out in the cold (except for all the window managers that base off of wlroots or something, I think it has an equivalent). Gnome? Good fucking luck.
Oh and screenshot tools. Those are tied to the DE now! Want to use a competing screenshot tool? You just… uh… can’t. I mean we’re on KDE and Spectacle is pretty great so it doesn’t really affect us, but if we didn’t like Spectacle, we’d be more or less screwed under Wayland.
Also scaling the screen. I don’t mean widget toolkit scaling. I mean e.g. integer scaling the screen pixels from 1920x1080 to 4K, a simple 2x2 for 4K TVs, or what-have-you. (Because 4K TVs don’t do this themselves even though they really should.) Or going the other way, rendering at 1280x960 and then downscaling to 640x480 so our CRT can get 120Hz. Easy on X11. Straight-up impossible on Wayland.
Oh yeah, and did I mention temporarily (not as default) disabling our PS4 controller’s trackpad from working as a mouse, without disabling any other trackpad on the system, without disabling its ability to work as a button or whatever in Steam Input? That too.
But also more generally, the whole attitude of “you’re just a Luddite who’s HOLDING US BACK!!”. See also systemd.
(I don’t like systemd for completely different reasons (political rather than technical) but the very similar “you just need to get with the times!!!” attitude is also a massive turnoff for basically the same reason.)
(Also see also Rust. Ditto.)
By contrast, Pipewire? Legitimate improvement. It’s not just a “change bad” thing. There’s a reason Wayland/systemd/rust are controversial and Pipewire isn’t. A lot of it is the attitude, I think. People aren’t forcing Pipewire, either, and on the app side most stuff seems to still be the Pulseaudio API which is completely fine and means you can use either.
Hah, yeah, you probably don’t have a CRT monitor!
Having custom resolution support is INCREDIBLY important for them, because they have no native resolution and you can just throw pretty much anything at them and it looks fantastic. It’s great for getting high refresh rates in games, especially since decreasing the resolution means you don’t have to work as hard for that framerate, without the nastiness of upscaling.
And also our monitor reports 1280x1024 as the highest resolution. Which… is the wrong aspect ratio. ??? So we NEED custom resolutions to even have a usable monitor.
KDE finally came out with support for this… in a version that’s not in Debian yet… like, one major release before dropping X11 support completely. And pretty much every other desktop on the planet is just out in the cold (except for all the window managers that base off of wlroots or something, I think it has an equivalent). Gnome? Good fucking luck.
Oh and screenshot tools. Those are tied to the DE now! Want to use a competing screenshot tool? You just… uh… can’t. I mean we’re on KDE and Spectacle is pretty great so it doesn’t really affect us, but if we didn’t like Spectacle, we’d be more or less screwed under Wayland.
Also scaling the screen. I don’t mean widget toolkit scaling. I mean e.g. integer scaling the screen pixels from 1920x1080 to 4K, a simple 2x2 for 4K TVs, or what-have-you. (Because 4K TVs don’t do this themselves even though they really should.) Or going the other way, rendering at 1280x960 and then downscaling to 640x480 so our CRT can get 120Hz. Easy on X11. Straight-up impossible on Wayland.
Oh yeah, and did I mention temporarily (not as default) disabling our PS4 controller’s trackpad from working as a mouse, without disabling any other trackpad on the system, without disabling its ability to work as a button or whatever in Steam Input? That too.
Stuff like that.
But also more generally, the whole attitude of “you’re just a Luddite who’s HOLDING US BACK!!”. See also systemd.
(I don’t like systemd for completely different reasons (political rather than technical) but the very similar “you just need to get with the times!!!” attitude is also a massive turnoff for basically the same reason.)
(Also see also Rust. Ditto.)
By contrast, Pipewire? Legitimate improvement. It’s not just a “change bad” thing. There’s a reason Wayland/systemd/rust are controversial and Pipewire isn’t. A lot of it is the attitude, I think. People aren’t forcing Pipewire, either, and on the app side most stuff seems to still be the Pulseaudio API which is completely fine and means you can use either.