I have been using Linux Mint for about four months and currently run Cinnamon alongside an i3 session. My setup has two 60 Hz monitors: one 1920×1080 display and one 1280×1024 display. I am considering upgrading to two 1440p monitors with refresh rates around 120–144 Hz.
My hardware is an RTX 4060 8 GB, Ryzen 5 5600X, and 16 GB of RAM. Would running both monitors above 60 Hz be practical on X11, including using VRR in games? If a game is fullscreen on one monitor while a browser or video is open on the other, would the second display continue working normally? Some games may drop below 144 FPS, so I am also wondering how much that would affect the experience.
Would this setup be easier or more reliable with Wayland? Mint's Wayland support does not seem particularly mature, so I might need to change distributions. Does Wayland handle VRR and fractional scaling well, and what functionality would I lose compared with X11?
I currently use i3 and picom, including window and workspace animations. I am considering Sway as a Wayland replacement. Can Sway provide similar animation effects, or would I need to give those up?
3 Answers
X11 should handle two 1440p monitors well as long as they use the same scaling factor and refresh rate. The troublesome cases are usually mixed scaling or different refresh rates across displays. With matching 144 Hz monitors, your proposed arrangement is much less likely to hit those limitations.
There is no urgent need to leave X11 if your monitors have matching refresh rates and scaling. It has broader compatibility and may be the less disruptive choice on an older Mint installation. If you want Wayland now, using a distribution with well-supported current KDE, GNOME, or wlroots packages will probably be smoother than relying on experimental support. Staying on a conservative distribution is also reasonable if stability matters more than having the newest graphics features.
My main concern with changing distributions is stability. I would rather avoid updates that silently break applications or require troubleshooting every time something changes.
Wayland is worth considering, especially for modern multi-monitor setups, VRR, and fractional scaling. Sway is the closest equivalent to i3 and should make the transition fairly familiar. However, compositor and driver support still matters, so results can vary by desktop, GPU driver, and application. Sway itself does not provide the same kind of picom effects out of the box; animations generally require a different compositor or an animation-capable Wayland compositor.
So if both displays are 144 Hz, with a game on one and a browser playing video on the other, VRR should generally be workable?