I think this post is one of those "technically correct" but functionally wrong rants.
My experience with multiple monitors at different dpis hits nearly every case of failure he points out.
It's a lot more work to configure.
Apps fail to account for it.
Spanning two monitors results in terrible scaling problems.
Apps that do account for it at start up won't account for it during reposition, so they look fine if they open on the right monitor and terrible if moved to the other.
Getting solid workflows for flexible positioning requires hacks like mentioned at the end for xrandr.
Etc...
So sure, you can do it and it sucks.
That's not really the win I think the author seems to think it is.
"Technically correct" about fundamental limitations of reality but you still hate the truth and it's X11's fault?
I'm not even trying to defend X11, I don't have much love for it. I've done some Xlib programming in the past and I've hated it. I've never used Wayland, and I'm mostly on Windows these days.
But, I don't see how one could make a point that X11 is bad because of poor DPI support.
Some of the problems are indeed due to the sheer difficulty to implement proper high DPI/mixed DPI support, but some mentioned in the GP are definitely inflicted by the X11 protocol:
>Spanning two monitors results in terrible scaling problems.
>Apps that do account for it at start up won't account for it during reposition, so they look fine if they open on the right monitor and terrible if moved to the other.
Especially the second point. Applications on Wayland simply get told what scale they should draw on. No need to determine whether they are on the right monitor or the other monitor, yada yada. For those problems, how can you say X11 is not bad, when clearly other protocols have shown the problem is solvable?
My experience with multiple monitors at different dpis hits nearly every case of failure he points out.
It's a lot more work to configure.
Apps fail to account for it.
Spanning two monitors results in terrible scaling problems.
Apps that do account for it at start up won't account for it during reposition, so they look fine if they open on the right monitor and terrible if moved to the other.
Getting solid workflows for flexible positioning requires hacks like mentioned at the end for xrandr.
Etc...
So sure, you can do it and it sucks.
That's not really the win I think the author seems to think it is.