I built a nice little cyberdeck around an RPi 5 but it's turned out to be very disappointing. I was counting on classic X11's virtual display stuff to enable a 1080x480 screen to be usable with panning (virtual 720p or something, just a cool vertical pan). Problem is, the X11 support sucks, and so there's almost no 2D acceleration, so this simple thing that used to work great on a 486 with an ATI SVGA doesn't work very well at all on a machine a thousand times faster. Wayland has of course no support for a feature like this one, so I'm stuck with a screen too narrow to use, and performance for everything else that's pretty sub-par.

Aah, I had totally forgotten about that X11 feature, I did use it for something very many years ago. I have only used the default setup (which is presumably Wayland) on the Pi, looks good but I don't actually use display features much.

I haven't tried it myself but niri might do what you want using Wayland https://github.com/niri-wm/niri