zlacker

You certainly know what you're talking about because from a lot of experimentation, my take on the state of 2022:

If you want the "works so well it's boring", go with X11. The one exception, as you note, is multi-DPI, which has native support in Wayland.

For Wayland, there are (depending on DE/compositor) some specific issues or inconsistencies, like the scroll speed you are mentioning. Personally, I also have qt5 apps being all over the place with window placement under wlroots. There are times when you'll need to look up some environment variable to make an application or toolkit behave properly.

So if you're in the high-DPI+low-DPI scenario, yeah, it still takes some effort. For anyone else, I think OP holds.

My pick for a "boring stable desktop" stack:

* Dist: Your preference of Fedora/Debian/Arch. (Mint, Pop, and Endeavour acceptable derivatives)

* DE: Budgie/XFCE/MATE/Cinnamon

>>Legogr+(OP)
I can’t imagine not being in the “multi DPI” scenario though? It’s not some edge feature that affects a minority of power users, it’s just plugging an external display into a laptop. The DPIs almost never line up - not since high DPI displays became mainstream about 10 years ago.

>>udp+A4
I think this is more niche to care about than you might imagine. First off, a huge % of the population barely knows what an HDMI cable is and just doesn't plug their laptop into anything. Second, office workers might have a nice docking station setup, but in that case you are probably basically turning the laptop into a desktop (with a keyboard, mouse, and nice monitor) -- why bother with the laptop screen at all? Finally, perfect DPI matching isn't really required -- a 1080p laptop with a 1440p monitor should probably be fairly reasonable looking for most normal screen sizes.

>>bee_ri+6i
Because it is yet another screen to put stuff on.

>>pjmlp+Rr
Sure but it is a small one, and designing a way to place it ergonomically is going to require some extra effort.

>>Legogr+(OP)
Arch should not be listed as a boring stable desktop. In fact, just the other month it had a black screen outage involving grub that affected every user that did an update. If the distro requires the users to monitor an email list to avoid this kind of gotcha before doing an update, then it is neither boring nor stable.