This is understandable, and honestly xwayland is great, even with fractional scaling now, at the very least on KDE. I think simply relying on xwayland is a very viable solution now for a lot of apps. and it helps work around a lot of issues so that's always a major plus
It's not really hacky as far as I know, it's just the old status quo. On X applications could scale themselves if they have high DPI support, and that's what KDE is allowing. And it works great. The vast majority of apps I use support high DPI on X, and they work perfectly fine on xwayland.
It is legitimately a great experience using xwayland like this. A lot of apps I use, they look perfectly fine, they perform perfectly fine, and they're not broken, which is a massive plus.
Of course, this probably does break one or two apps out there. I'm not saying it's a perfect solution. It's far from it. But honestly, I think it's a really good solution. It allows developers the ease and flexibility of developing for X11 if you don't need Wayland's features.
Of course, you are still losing out. Having proper touch support is such an amazing feature with Wheland. Don't get me wrong. I love a lot about Wheland. It's just a pain in the ass to develop for. It is nowhere near as flexible as X11.
Setting the DPI is only a partial solution and plenty of assets and rendering will be incorrect. It is more crisp, especially for text, than the approach others take of upscaling though. It’s probably the approach I’d prefer personally.
Everything I've tried works better under Wayland than it did under X :3 Battlefield V, for example (why I play that... who knows :-\ ) has always taken a bunch of struggling with Wine/Proton versions and settings to get it to run at all, and even then it was a crashy glitchy mess. I decided to try it under Wayland just for the hell of it and somehow it's absolutely flawless now (okay fine, there's some kinda mouse focus bug I've been working around but still). Sooo now I just use Sway all' the time. It's great. I made a whole thread just to gush about it. Wayland and xwayland both seem to be doing great! Woo! Cheerness! \ö/ 🥳 et cetera!
Think so, I actually had a different perspective
Games that I run under native x11 stutter to the point where I don't enjoy playing it anymore (rocket league in my example) but under xwayland the game runs without any issues/stutters