>"I said "whatever, it's a good thing I don't play too much WoW" and made peace with what it was."
and
>"I'm not going to suffer through some software that I actually need to use under WINE having fucked up mouse handling,"
I can't even play video games properly for the two hours a week that I do it. I'm not waiting for an actual headache to crop up.
When using X11, I don't have to make compromises. I have better things to do with my time, and I'll reconsider in three to five years when the situation is hopefully more stable. Mixed DPI sucks on X11, but at least works to some extent, even if pretty shittily. Worst case, you can just buy compatible monitors, like you have to do with GPUs when you're considering Wayland support/stability.
Look, if it's ok to say don't buy nvidia graphics cards and expect to use Wayland, why is it not ok to say don't buy mixed DPI and expect to use X11?
Mixed DPI is a giant PITA, and high DPI is also a PITA, so just buy regular DPI monitors that are about similar. :P
It’s still a hard sell when everything just works on Windows and macOS. It’s yet another reason why someone won’t pick up Linux when 90% of the features they want are present.
On windows I just plug my external monitor with regular DPI and it auto-recognize that this external monitor have regular DPI and size it acordingly while keeping the HIDPI of my laptop perfectly untouched and also auto recognized.
While on xorg, goodluck with that.
On Wayland it works, but require manual intervention of enabling fractional scaling and setting everything manually.
Screen sharing is a pain, I did get it working on Arch finally though, but it's still a pain at this point. And I only got "screen" sharing i.e. not "app sharing" or "monitor/virtual-monitor sharing" working. Latter part could well be some more config or tweaking I need to do, regardless it's not the users fault if they can't figure this out in Wayland when it works fine everywhere else out of the box. I've gotten it to work well enough for my personal use case but it's definitely not far enough along for the typical use case.
X11 isn't that great with monitor setups with multiple DPI. It's certainly one of the biggest user facing "wins" for Wayland but much like you dismiss playing WoW as something you don't do most users don't deal with mixed DPI setups so the biggest "win" really doesn't mean much to most. That doesn't mean it can't be a great reason for you to prefer Wayland though.
Sway won't even launch on my Nvidia computers so I've just got them running Windows with WSL. I don't think it's X11/Wayland's fault on this one, Nvidia is just a bit too locked down when it comes to Linux preventing good support from anybody. At the same time the professional hardware is just better so you don't always have a choice to just use an AMD card even if you were willing to change hardware for better support.
I really like my Wayland setup but it's important to understand the tradeoffs I was willing to make and the efforts I was willing to put in don't mean Wayland was perfect it means it was better for my situation. For another user it's probably a HORRIBLE fit right now. That's not their fault, nor anyone else's fault, it's just a difference in use case.
I think Wayland is getting pretty close (particularly for the less stubborn willing to let xwayland run as well) to being ready for most users but that's what many have been trumpeting for 5 years so it's created a bit of pushback when you say it is now.
In my opinion neither x11 or wayland is perfect both brings huge amount of pain. Whereas wayland brings the least amount of pain for my usecase and shows the only prospect of improvement.
If I were a sensible person I would just use windows with wsl where’s absolutely everything just works as intended and there’s no tugwar. But I’m too stubborn for that and I hope I will one day install Linux and everything just works without having to do a extensive research for compatibility and workarounds
I recently installed Fedora after my Windows install bombed out after an update. I went to play World of Warcraft with my buddies and found that the mouse handling in Wayland was pretty severely broken, at least for WoW. You move by clicking both of your mouse buttons, which starts moving you forward, and then you turn your mouse to steer. Under X11, your mouse is in the same place after you release your buttons (this is the intended behavior). Under Wayland, only god knows where it's going to pop up; it seems to be following your mouse movement while you turn, but not exactly. I said "whatever, it's a good thing I don't play too much WoW" and made peace with what it was.
Then I went to share my screen. I couldn't. Total showstopper -- I use this functionality every single day, and I can't part with it. Wayland is officially off the table.
I've been using X11 since. Everything has worked perfectly. I'm not going to suffer through some software that I actually need to use under WINE having fucked up mouse handling, or hold out for multiple years before I can share my screen again. I can't imagine even attempting taking Wayland seriously if I had Nvidia hardware. If somebody's take is that I should go fuck myself for expecting things to work while they tell me that my other options are wrong and bad because it works for "most people" (which is pretty stupid -- even Average Joe has a lot of showstoppers, it's why the Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't happened), they can have fun dumping time into software that's inferior in many regards.
EDIT: in response to Drew's flagged and dead comment (which I feel is quite unreasonable, he brings up a point about the compositor having some responsibility here too) -- I am not using Wayland under GNOME -- I switched to KDE and spent a fair amount of time digging through DE, WINE, and software settings trying to get these things working. I'm willing to slog through a lot of shit to get the technically correct solution, but some bridges are too far. I'm not changing my entire DE, GPU, software choices, etc. for the sake of using Wayland, even though it's superior to X11, and I think that's what a lot of proponents of it are missing.