Interlaced monitor support for Wayland

olifurz · 2026-04-03 16:23:08

With KDE dropping X11 support in 2027 it seems natural to move towards Wayland, however from what I've heard there isn't any suitable support for interlaced monitors on it compared to X11? CRT gaming and such is still popular especially with the use of linux-based computers like Pis, and some people (myself included) just prefer 4:3 monitors and CRTs, though the future doesn't seem that hopeful if there isn't any support for it.

Will any support come, if it even is that difficult to implement?

seth · 2026-04-03 19:15:39

CRT, analog video, interlacing and wayland are orthogonal.
Afaiu raspberry pi's do not provide an analog crtc and I don't think there ever were digital CRTs (while certainly analog TFTs)
Does your setup currently work on X11?

xrandr --verbose

There's talks about the wayland protocol allowing unsynchronized output, so the only concern would be optimized rendering for interlaced output (rendering two half frames)?

olifurz · 2026-04-03 21:00:09

seth wrote:

CRT, analog video, interlacing and wayland are orthogonal.
Afaiu raspberry pi's do not provide an analog crtc and I don't think there ever were digital CRTs (while certainly analog TFTs)
Does your setup currently work on X11?
xrandr --verbose
There's talks about the wayland protocol allowing unsynchronized output, so the only concern would be optimized rendering for interlaced output (rendering two half frames)?

Don't think there are digital CRTs, but there are converters out there which will happily convert an interlaced digital signal from a GPU into an analog one as far as this reddit post is concerned, which then can be fed into a CRT.

I don't have a CRT monitor myself as of right now, i'm considering getting one but would like to know if it's even possible on wayland (hence why i'm asking here )

Last edited by olifurz (2026-04-03 21:00:29)

seth · 2026-04-03 21:18:22

If your output can produce an interlaced signal (something you can already try if you have any monitor that will accept such - of which there're plenty) there's nothing about wayland™ that would preclude that - drm/kms certainly can.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/fb/modedb.rst

Whether this works w/ any specific compositor is subject to that compositor, see eg. https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/4607 (though the status was set in response to inaction of the bug reporter)
For kwin_wayland specifically see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=517654

Arch Linux

#1 2026-04-03 16:23:08

Interlaced monitor support for Wayland

#2 2026-04-03 19:15:39

Re: Interlaced monitor support for Wayland

#3 2026-04-03 21:00:09

Re: Interlaced monitor support for Wayland

#4 2026-04-03 21:18:22

Re: Interlaced monitor support for Wayland

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