Once they become stabilized and if other desktops took an interest, then they could be proposed as standard. But KDE does not need to wait for GNOME to implement a feature in Wayland, or vice versa. If you could mention which KDE developer you were talking to then maybe we could help them get this implemented in KDE first? Then afterwards if they can offer some tips to offer GTK (or other toolkits) on how to implement this, that would be valuable to everyone.
Sure, Gnome still won't adopt them ever because they're stubborn and think they know everything better, but at least I'd have a somewhat working solution.
Maybe elementary OS would actually use it too, they've already got support for just scaling everything based on the font size.
Thing is, I need this functionality yesterday. And it's been an absolute pain hearing that even if you spend an excessive amount of work today, in a community where all of gnome is against you, maybe someday in a decade it'll get better.
As long as Gtk refuses to support this, I can fix KDE, but I can't fix Java or browsers.
Java, Firefox and Chrome reject patches, saying Gnome is responsible. Gnome says they don't care.
And I don't want to run custom builds of Firefox and Java anymore. It was such a hassle constantly building them from source with my old patchset.
If you are really committed to using Linux and don't want to wait then I said it before but I think a better use of your time would be to spend a few hundred dollars on some different monitors that can work at just 2x scale, and then let someone else deal with this.
Usual price point around $1600-$2200.
Comparable 2× monitors start at around $4500, and the cheapest option only supports macOS and has a $1000 monitor stand.
A "few hundred dollars" won't be enough.
At the moment, I just work all day at ~10-15fps using Budgie with fractional dpi on X11, but it's definitely not a great experience.
I used to be 100% in on KDE, but as you mentioned, Wayland support is limited.
Budgie is atm sadly the only option for multi-monitor hidpi that's not using gnome's broken top bar concept.
That said, 10-15 fps on X11 is a pathological case, something is wrong there. When I ran X11 and played with xrandr, the slightly larger framebuffer had zero impact (outside games) on AMD Vega64.
The issue with that is that first of all, the wayland protocol needs to be modified to add support for this, and the entire freedesktop/gnome community refuses to even consider adding support for anything like this because gnome doesn’t need it/can’t support it.
I’ve talked with vendors of devices using Linux with Wayland, who’ve been trying to get the committee to add support for years.
I’ve talked with KDE devs who’ve been frustrated without limits.
There’s a lot of people who are absolutely burnt out and angered by the constant stonewalling from Gnome, pretending for a decade that no one needs this and so it shouldn’t even exist.