Installed Ubuntu 23.10 on a new laptop but ran into some fractional scaling/high DPI issues with apps like Steam and Discord. Comments online suggested using Wayland, so I'm going to try out Fedora which uses Wayland by default. Came across this article and thought others might like a refresher on X11 vs Wayland.

Ubuntu has enabled Wayland by default since version 21.04, so unless you explicitly opted into an X11 desktop session you are already on Wayland.

Wayland is not enabled by default if your system has Nvidia graphics card.

Incredible, Is Nvidia still having issues with Wayland ? It has been, what, 10 years ?

They've been pushing for an alternative driver model (EGLStreams vs GBM) and only recently capitulated.

We continue to complain about it all the time... but like most Wayland heads, you stick it in the sand and ignore us and keep saying it's ready! :(

Steam and Discord are both X11 apps, so switching to a Wayland session may not help much as they will still use X via XWayland. There may be a way to force Discord to use Wayland as its an Electron app.

In general I've found KDE does a great job dealing with fractional scaling with XWayland apps, GNOME not so much. I'm using Fedora's KDE spin.

Here is a good history of X:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-N-fgKWYGU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ is also good

It's like X11, but faster and buggier.

Downvoted because it isn't actually faster.