this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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I feel that the biggest mistake of X11's protocol design is the idea of a "root window" that is supposed to cover the whole screen.
Perhaps that worked greatly in the 1990s, but it's just completely incompatible with multi-displays that we commonly see in modern setups. Hacks upon hacks were involved to make multi-displays a possibility on X11. The root window no longer corresponded to a single display. In heterogenous display setups, part of the root window is actually invisible.
Later on we decided to stack compositing on top of the already-hacky mess, and it was so bad that many opted to disable the compositor (no Martha, compositors are more than wobbly windows!).
And then there's the problem of sandboxing programs... Which is completely unmappable to X11 even with hacks.
Multiple displays work fine. The only thing that needs to be drawn in the root window is attractive backgrounds sized to your displays I'm not sure why you think that is hacky or complicated.
Multiple displays only work as long as you have identical resolutions and refresh rates. Good luck mixing monitors with different scaling factors and refresh rates on X11.
I run multiple refresh rates without any trouble, one 165hz monitor alongside my other 60hz ones. Is that supposed to be broken somehow?
This wasn't true in 2003 when I started using Linux in fact the feature is so old I'm not sure exactly when it was implemented. You have always been able to have different resolutions and in fact different scaling factors. It works like this
You scale your lower DPI display or displays UP to match your highest DPI and let X scale down to the physical size. HIGHER / LOWER = SCALE FACTOR. So with 2 27" monitors where one is 4k and the other is 1080p the factor is 2, a 27" 4K with a 24" 1080p is roughly 1.75.
Configured like so everything is sharp and UI elements are the same size on every screen. If your monitors are vertically aligned you could put a window between monitors and see the damn characters lined up correctly.
If you use the soooo unfriendly Nvidia GPU you can actually configure this in its GUI for configuring your monitors. If not you can set with xrandr the argument is --scale shockingly enough
Different refresh rates also of course work but you ARE limited to the lower refresh rate. This is about the only meaningful limitation.
It's the fact that the root window is a lie.
...What? The root window was supposed to mean "the whole screen". It no longer does - that's the lie. Then people created XRandR to help work around it - that's the hack.