> Tearing (graphical glitches) is terrible, especially if you’re doing screen sharing.

Download and run "picom" (its default configuration is good), or any other compositor. This is the way to get graphical acceleration for regular windows on X11, and fix tearing.

> Scaling stuff is a total mess, a mess that you can mostly get to work, but you’ll need to set four different environment variables and run a gsettings daemon and set these three properties and add this file to this location and that one to that and modify your Chromium flags and I probably even forgot a couple of steps.

I just modify ~/.Xresources with the "Xft.dpi: 120" for 1.25x scaling. All apps I care about pick this value to scale the UI with (chrome, firefox, telegram, Qt as a whole, etc). Notable exceptions being java apps.

See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#X_Resources https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg#Setting_DPI_manually