Neat little thing I just noticed, might be known but I never head of it before: apparently, a Wayland window can vsync to at least 3 monitors with different refresh rates at the same time.
I have 3 monitors, at 60 Hz, 144 Hz, and 60 Hz from left to right. I was using glxgears to test something, and noticed when I put the window between the monitors, it’ll sync to a weird refresh rate of about 193 fps. I stretched it to span all 3 monitors, and it locked at about 243 fps. It seems to oscillate between 242.5 and 243.5 gradually back and forth. So apparently, it’s mixing the vsync signals together and ensuring every monitor’s got a fresh frame while sharing frames when the vsyncs line up.
I knew Wayland was big on “every frame is perfect”, but I didn’t expect that to work even across 3 monitors at once! We’ve come a long, long way in the graphics stack. I expected it to sync to the 144Hz monitor and just tear or hiccup on the other ones.
Yeah I mean it’s still kinda cool. X protocol is vector based iirc, and you can just set up xauth and use ssh -X to forward windows over ssh
Anyway I’m sure this doesn’t matter today, and the performance sucks for typical use
It does matter in distributed application on LANs. The thin client model is still in operation at a lot of HPC and similar environments. Laptops and Desktops just display what is being done elsewhere.
Remote X11 is a better user experience in that environment than anything else I’ve tried. It feels like the application is local even if it’s not.