> if I were running multiple monitors each with different scaling factors and refresh rates, but that sounds pretty niche

So basically you're calling almost every modern laptop + external screen setup "pretty niche". I wonder whose post is more silly.

I think every monitor I've seen in the last 20 years has had a 60 Hz refresh rate. Most people probably don't even know scaling options exist, so using different ones on different monitors is going to be niche, yeah.

I just got a new laptop for work last month. HDR 4k display. It's still 60 Hz. More only matters for people who are really into gaming, and then you wouldn't be using a laptop.

Refresh rate - sure. But scaling?...

> Most people probably don't even know scaling options exist, so using different ones on different monitors is going to be niche, yeah.

If you don't know the thing exists, that doesn't mean you don't use it. Modern OSes adjust scaling automatically for the screen DPI. Otherwise using configs like Retina MacBook + 1440p displays, or 4k laptop + 4k external display would be very painful.

To be honest I've never seen scaling done well. I just plugged my 32" 4k monitor into my 16" windows work laptop (both 4k), and things on the monitor are too big, even after tweaking!

I have everything set to 100% scaling because that's a low as you can put it. The defaults had my laptop at 250% (!!!) and external monitor at 150%, which makes the laptop in particular look like some cramped 800x600 monitor out of 1995. In theory I'd like to have my external display be at something like 75% because it's so much larger than the laptop, but I've never seen any OS support this. Does wayland let you do fractional scales like this?

Edit: I also just tried plugging my 4k monitor into my Linux laptop (with a 1920x1080 screen), and it at least defaults both to 100%, which is more sane than "modern" windows. Again I'd probably prefer 75% scaling on the 1080 monitor because things are otherwise too big.

I don't know what to say here because exact scaling parameters are very subjective, but personally I find 250% scaling for 4k@16" okayish? I use 175% for 1440p@14", and 125% for 4k@27", which is slightly smaller than what Windows suggested you.

When I had my previous laptop, it had 100% for 4k@16" in Linux by default, and it was causing me a pain in the eyes. Switched to 200% back then, because fractional scaling in Ubuntu wasn't working well.

I'm not sure if it's possible to have scaling less than 100%, I just never thought to make things smaller, not bigger.

I just checked, and at the recommended 250% scaling at 4k on a 16" monitor in Windows, I can see 0-3 messages on the screen at once in Slack, and just under 34 lines of code and 113 columns in VS Code at default zoom levels. If I do a vertical split in VS Code, I get 51 columns in each pane, which makes it basically useless. Icons and even things like the minimize button are like a full centimeter across.

I don't understand the point of a high resolution monitor that you scale up. Just to have extremely crisp lines? To me the whole point of a high resolution is that you can have more information on the screen because it remains legible when small.

a 16" 4k with no scaling? You must be about 3 inches from the screen

A lot of the ones I see available are 75 Hz

Also, is that 60 or 59.94 Hz? Both exist

One of my external monitors always tries to run at 170 hz by default, which doesn't work and the screen is black, and I have to go into the display setter app in xfce to change it to 60. The monitor can probably do it, just not when it's one of two 4k monitors on a docking station.

Most of the time on a normal boot, the xfce display app will apply my saved config and the monitor works, but several apps like kicad somehow glitch out something at random times and I lose both external monitors as though the dock were unplugged and then replugged.

What that happens, it's an extra level of ridiculous. I have to use TWO different apps to recover.

First I have to use ArandR to reset the layout with left, right, and center screens. The normal xfce display app does not work for this even though it does at other times. Trying to click on the little scteens doesn't do anything. But ArandR works.

But ArandR has no way to set the 170hz one back to 60. For that, I have to go back to the xfce app, which is now working after ArandR fixed whatever it fixed.

Then I can resume work. Sometimes for only a minute before it happens again.

It's completely ridiculous and has spanned a few different monitors and docking stations and tb3 and tb4 cables. The one constant is the Framework laptop after upgrading to the i7 1280p motherboard.

Anyway, monitors with all kinds of framerates are now the norm. I'm not even a gamer. I didn't seek out a high framerate monitor specially. I just wanted a good monitor in general with a type of stand that would not waste all my desk space. I think the other monitor can do 120 too for that matter, but somehow is better behaved and doesn't try to when it won't work. It's the norm.

Virtually every modern laptop with a dGPU runs Nvidia, so Wayland is still a no-go there too.

(And no, if Nouveau is an option for you then you probably wouldn't have a dGPU in the first place.)

Linux on the laptops with Nvidia dGPU is miserable enough without X/Wayland discussions. I beleive people who are buying laptops to install Linux mostly use ones without dGPUs.

I have been using Linux on laptops with NVIDIA dGPUs (from Dell and Lenovo) during the last decade without any problem whatsoever.

Not only nothing was miserable, but the NVIDIA dGPUs have allowed applications that are still impossible with GPUs from other vendors, e.g. professional applications using OpenGL that expose bugs in the drivers from other vendors or that have a too low performance on other hardware, or computational CUDA applications that benefit from the many useful libraries provided freely by NVIDIA.

For simpler applications AMD and Intel are fine, but unfortunately there are still many cases when there is no alternative for NVIDIA.

NVIDIA may be criticized for the greediness of their pricing policy or for the slow progress towards providing an open-source kernel driver, but claiming that they offer a miserable Linux experience is completely false.

Very few companies provide a similar level of Linux support, despite the fact that there are some kernel developers who continue to try to sabotage the work needed for maintaining the NVIDIA Linux kernel driver.

NVIDIA provides much more free Linux tools for their GPUs than any other GPU vendor.

Most Wayland compositors work on Nvidia now, though

> I'm not worried about running a keylogger or something that's going to surreptitiously capture my screen. It's not a major issue. It's not an issue at all. Never comes up.

Yeah, I don't get this argument. If a process can already run on my account then I'm screwed anyway. It's trivial to e.g. do some bash magic to transparently replace `sudo` to get access to root without me knowing, and then hook into e.g. evdev to keylog every keystroke regardless of whether it's on Wayland or X11.

Unless you sandbox everything (and no one does that on a normal desktop) Wayland's extra "security" guarantees are completely useless in practice, because they're trivial to bypass.

You may be right that Linux is a security disaster even with X11 replaced by Wayland, but ChromeOS is pretty secure and uses Wayland whereas I can't imagine its ever choosing to use X11.

> You may be right that Linux is a security disaster

How so? If you run a program that you trust, like "ls", "vim", "firefox", "cat" or "rm", then you absolutely want it to be able to access all your data. That's the whole point of running a program: to read/write your data.

If, for some reason, you want to run a program that you don't trust, you can run it easily inside a container or a virtual machine.

I fail to see how this is a "security disaster". It seems very sane to me. How could it be even better?

It's a rather all or nothing approach. You either trust it to access everything, or you don't run it at all. There's no middle ground. This is something I rather appreciate about Deno versus Node. There was a demonstration where cowsay was asking a bunch of permissions to things you wouldn't expect cowsay to need. And apps could update to increase what it accesses, like telemetry, and you wouldn't know or have any means to stop it. And the all or nothing approach means you just have to stop using the app entirely.

> X doesn't get worse and worse; it continues to just work.

I think some systems might be forcing breakage into it: I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 (had to wait for approval for work laptops, and I keep my personal one at the same release as a reference point) and with that upgrade did I start seeing a weird visual glitch, where new windows would be covered in static for a second before drawing.