This is great. I recently moved to KDE Plasma (on Nobara Linux) after many years of Pop OS, because I recently moved into a new office, and no longer have room to have my Mac and Linux setups side by side, but have to consolidate them in a single seat.

There are 4-5 monitor arms and the monitors are a mix of 4K and 8K.

AFAIK (and I have tried quite a lot, including the latest of all major distros like Fedora, Ubuttnu, OpenSUSE, etc) KDE Plasma using Wayland is the only way to have a typical "full desktop environment" (like GNOME, KDE, MATE, etc) that supports this kind of multi-monitor setup (where the monitors have significantly different ppi and thus need different scaling factors) and "just work" like Windows does.

(BTW even macOS doesn't support this well in my experience - it renders the 8K at 6K and downscales that to 4K, and also with all monitors connected, one of them (seemingly random) blanks out for 1 second every few minutes. But I have only tested this on an M1 Max laptop.)

Any modern Linux "kinda" works — if you are OK with the 4K monitors being HUGE or the 8K monitors unreadably small. Per-monitor fractional scaling is an iffy thing on Linux, and only KDE + Wayland.

It almost works on X11 but just doesn't. The usual jank happens when switching monitors via a KVM, or unplugging one or plugging one back in — but then it goes into a "jank loop".

So this is what finally dragged me reluctantly to Wayland. But I'm grateful to the KDE guys for hammering doggedly on multi-monitor Wayland support lately, because it is literally the only thing I have found that lets me boot up Linux and have all my displays work.

I still feel like KDE is a little buggy overall, but not significantly more so than GNOME, which is the only other desktop environment with a similar breadth.

P.S. If you want to deal with a desktop that is simpler (yet more DIY and higher maintenance), I think you can make Sway or Hyprland work with arbitrary resolution multi-monitor setups. But it is a lot of work. I mainly use desktop Linux for writing code at my day job, so I hoped to have something I can just install and use right away without tweaking and reading docs (fun as that might be).

Pop OS works really well on 8K or 4K, but not both at the same time.

Does KDE let you change workspaces on each monitor independently? Or does it carry over the X11 EWMH backage that requires you to have a single root window across all monitors with each workspace stretched out across it? So when you change a workspace, it changes across all monitors.

You can set it to have different activities for each desktop and then have different desktops on each screen. Have a look at that too https://github.com/wsdfhjxc/kwin-scripts#virtual-desktops-on...

I ended up writing my own WM instead: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo