>> The hard part of scaling is drawing UI elements like raster icons or 1px hair...

kllrnohj · 2025-06-25T00:49:42 1750812582

Yeah this is kinda the big elephant in the room here? They didn't prove what they set out to prove. Yes obviously OpenGL does scaling just fine, the entire point of Wayland is to get the compositor to just being a compositor. They didn't do any scaling with X. They didn't do anything at all with X other than ask it some basic display information.

slackfan · 2025-06-25T01:19:39 1750814379

X shouldn't be displaying anything that isn't a right angle anyway.

All circular UI elements are haram.

kelnos · 2025-06-25T03:44:39 1750823079

Toolkits don't use X to do much (if any) drawing these days. They all use something like cairo or skia or -- yes -- OpenGL to render offscreen, and then upload to X for display (or in the case of OpenGL, they can also do direct rendering).

lotharcable · 2025-06-25T19:28:30 1750879710

Yes toolkit authors have realized they have to avoid X11 as much as possible if they want to have good results.

This one of the major motivations as to why X11 guys decided Wayland was a good idea.

Because having your display server draw your application's output instead of your application drawing the output is a bad idea.

sprash · 2025-06-25T07:05:09 1750835109

If you use Cairo on X11 rendering automatically happens with the XRender extension. This is a rather efficient wire protocol that supports sub-pixel coordinates, transparency, gradients and more. No off-screen rendering required. (Some of the older gtk2 theme engines worked that way and allowed beautiful UIs with fast remote capabilities.)