I just tested it on one of my laptops running Linux Mint Debian edition 7, (Debian 13 Trixie under the hood) with the Cinnamon desktop environment running X11 and it worked perfectly also. 4K TV set as the primary monitor scaled at 150%, the laptop’s screen as the secondary, 1080p at 100% scaling, applied the settings and it was completely fine.
X11 fractional scaling is not great. It may have looked fine if you only had a cursory glance, but it has many issues. “True” fractional scaling in X11 doesn’t work on a per-monitor basis IIRC, instead any per-monitor fractional scaling will be a relatively simple resize operation that results in lots of blurriness.
Yes, KDE is a desktop environment. It’s one of the “Windows-like” ones and very customizable, and arguably the most technically advanced one at the moment.
Wayland is the display server, as it is called. It’s basically the back-end component that facilitates actually displaying anything on the screen. It replaced another component called X11, which was released in 1987 and had become a completely unmaintainable mess of technological debt.
Wayland took a very long time to develop and there are still some growing pains, which is why you will occasionally still see people arguing that X11 is better – these days you should probably just ignore anyone who says that though, as the overwhelming majority of users will be much better served by Wayland than by X11.
As for what distros support it, basically every up-to-date distro (latest major version release during or after 2024) using one of the following desktop environments will default to Wayland: KDE, Gnome, COSMIC, Sway, Hyprland. Other DEs don’t yet have stable Wayland support. Notably Linux Mint, a very common recommendation, is not on this list because the Cinnamon DE it uses does not yet support Wayland.
A couple of example distros mentioned in the thread and article would be Bazzite, Fedora and CachyOS. These distros all update swiftly, which is desirable because the Linux desktop is advancing very quickly at the moment. Slower-moving distros like Debian or Ubuntu LTS tend to miss out on a lot of nice new features.
X11 fractional scaling is not great. It may have looked fine if you only had a cursory glance, but it has many issues. “True” fractional scaling in X11 doesn’t work on a per-monitor basis IIRC, instead any per-monitor fractional scaling will be a relatively simple resize operation that results in lots of blurriness.
KDE is a desktop environment right? What is Wayland? Does any distro come with these out of the box?
Yes, KDE is a desktop environment. It’s one of the “Windows-like” ones and very customizable, and arguably the most technically advanced one at the moment.
Wayland is the display server, as it is called. It’s basically the back-end component that facilitates actually displaying anything on the screen. It replaced another component called X11, which was released in 1987 and had become a completely unmaintainable mess of technological debt.
Wayland took a very long time to develop and there are still some growing pains, which is why you will occasionally still see people arguing that X11 is better – these days you should probably just ignore anyone who says that though, as the overwhelming majority of users will be much better served by Wayland than by X11.
As for what distros support it, basically every up-to-date distro (latest major version release during or after 2024) using one of the following desktop environments will default to Wayland: KDE, Gnome, COSMIC, Sway, Hyprland. Other DEs don’t yet have stable Wayland support. Notably Linux Mint, a very common recommendation, is not on this list because the Cinnamon DE it uses does not yet support Wayland.
A couple of example distros mentioned in the thread and article would be Bazzite, Fedora and CachyOS. These distros all update swiftly, which is desirable because the Linux desktop is advancing very quickly at the moment. Slower-moving distros like Debian or Ubuntu LTS tend to miss out on a lot of nice new features.