Honestly, you're right. I should just stop trying to discuss with the wayland wg and gnome devs and just create my own protocol extension without asking anyone, submit patches to Qt, Kwin, and certain webbrowsers, and then just use those myself.
Sure, Gnome still won't adopt them ever because they're stubborn and think they know everything better, but at least I'd have a somewhat working solution.
Maybe elementary OS would actually use it too, they've already got support for just scaling everything based on the font size.
Thing is, I need this functionality yesterday. And it's been an absolute pain hearing that even if you spend an excessive amount of work today, in a community where all of gnome is against you, maybe someday in a decade it'll get better.
I think that sounds like a great idea. But I just don't understand why you were so invested in GNOME adopting them when it seems clear that they weren't really that interested, and now it seems like it actually doesn't even matter to you? I'm sure you know not to "put all your eggs in one basket" as it were.
Honestly, the big issue is that Gtk is used as basis to obtain the scaling factors for all browsers, Java, and several other tools including everything based on electron.
As long as Gtk refuses to support this, I can fix KDE, but I can't fix Java or browsers.
Java, Firefox and Chrome reject patches, saying Gnome is responsible. Gnome says they don't care.
And I don't want to run custom builds of Firefox and Java anymore. It was such a hassle constantly building them from source with my old patchset.
I think if KDE actually had a working implementation of this then that would go a really long way towards convincing those other things to support it. IIRC Chrome at least doesn't get the scale from GTK. But KDE's Wayland implementation is still unstable (in part because it seems to have a lot more features than GNOME's wayland implementation) so I think it will be a while before that happens too.
If you are really committed to using Linux and don't want to wait then I said it before but I think a better use of your time would be to spend a few hundred dollars on some different monitors that can work at just 2x scale, and then let someone else deal with this.
Ah okay. I think the work required to get this implemented across the stack will still cost a lot more than $11,000, just saying. Also in my opinion 4K monitors at that size are an unfortunate purchase because the PPI is not high enough to look crisp at that viewing distance. Apple upgraded theirs because you need to get above 200 PPI range in order to have it look comparable to print. For me personally, I couldn't justify spending my spare time working on that when other monitors exist that don't have that problem.
4K at 27" is an unfortunate resolution / density. I know, I also have such monitor :(.
That said, 10-15 fps on X11 is a pathological case, something is wrong there. When I ran X11 and played with xrandr, the slightly larger framebuffer had zero impact (outside games) on AMD Vega64.
Sure, Gnome still won't adopt them ever because they're stubborn and think they know everything better, but at least I'd have a somewhat working solution.
Maybe elementary OS would actually use it too, they've already got support for just scaling everything based on the font size.
Thing is, I need this functionality yesterday. And it's been an absolute pain hearing that even if you spend an excessive amount of work today, in a community where all of gnome is against you, maybe someday in a decade it'll get better.