A little bit of context:
My biggest annoyance ever since I switched to a full time laptop docking setup has been trying to game on external displays. I often do game both at my desk with an external monitor plugged via thunderbolt but not always. There are times when I travel and I do play games just on the laptops screen, or I just don’t feel like sitting at my desk to play something laid back and I just get tray and enjoy a game on the couch or something.
My laptops screen is 2K, using 150% display scaling. Games, especially older ones or titles running on wine/proton, still use X11/XWayland as their backend. This is fine when I don’t have an external display plugged in, I use the Apply scaling themselves option and it’s all great-
But as soon I plug my external, also 2K display but running natively with no scaling things get messy. I still use my laptops screen as seconday, very handy for secondary tasks, but due to using Apply scaling themselves games think my external display is 4K (i understand why, that’s just the limitation of X11, basically taking the screen and applying 150% to it because there is no such thing as per display scaling on X, just global).
It’s messy, I have to constantly remind myself to switch the setting to Scaled by the system. I have tried to just set the game to 1440p within it, but not all games support setting resolutions, and doing so it just looks all blurry and smeary. I’m hoping I’m not the only one with this issue.
Idea:
My proposal is to have a little drop-down where you select a hybrid option. KWin would check which is your “primary” display, and try to adjust the settings according to that. So if you were to have a lower scaling, on your primary, it would adapt to that (like 125% and a second display with 150%, adapt to best suite the 125% since that’s the primary). Or just like in my case, where I have a native screen and a scaled screen, where it would try to best suite for the primary screen (in this case outright just switch to Scaled by the system). I myself really don’t mind having blurred programs on a secondary screen, I’d rather have a way smoother and easier experience on my “primary” monitor.
I know, why bother to implement something like this when wine/proton or even older games will get native wayland support. I believe native will still take a long time to implement, and there would still be way older games that will just probably never see the light of native wayland.
I’m hoping with this proposal to make laptop gamers that still use their laptop display have a better time enjoying Wayland.
Anyways, sorry for rambling and all and I hope this idea is not stupid and it makes sense lol.