5 ms·

If those are your best arguments against Wayland you are making a good case for it because: input is broken and inconsistent – what? screenshots don't work –

If those are your best arguments against Wayland you are making a good case for it because: input is broken and inconsistent – what? screenshots don't work – they do. I use them all the time. remoting is broken – I know it's supported but I've never wanted to do it. every WM has to be rewritten or abandoned – of course, that's by design. Wayland doesn't even have WMs. c&p handling are not yet there – do you mean copy and paste? That works fine; it also has a clipboard manager protocol.

jcelerier 6y ago
> screenshots don't work – they do. I use them all the time. they don't work on wayland, they work on specific compositors that implement an extension.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Are there even any Wayland compositors in actual use that don't support that extension?
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    if you go to r/unixporn there are a ton of custom X11 WMs with very very small userbase - sometimes a dozen individuals. Screenshotting works with all of them.
    - akvadrako 6y ago
      WMs are not compositors. Compositors are more like a WM combined with X.org.
      - jcelerier 6y ago
        yes, that's the issue - writing a different desktop metaphor like the various tiling WMs was something that took as few as a couple hundred lines of C. Now with Wayland the person who wants to write his own desktop environment has to rewrite much more to get to something that doesn't even provide half of what Xorg gives. Also, compositors are not mandatory anyways on X (I don't use one personnally and prefer it like that) so it's a weird remark to make.
- ywei3410 6y ago
  While technically correct, this misses the point. Very few features are part of the core Wayland protocol; off the top of my bind, there's the input methods, and a few ways to describe shared memory with the compositor and some callbacks to handle device registration. That's it. For example, top level windows and popups themselves are an extension in Wayland (xdg_shell protocol rather than the defunct wl_shell), and so is the rather basic feature of compositing on the GPU (dma_buf) rather than going through some shared CPU memory.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > Very few features are part of the core Wayland protocol; but that is the main critique. Most of the things not being part of core means that there is a lot more fragmentation of the linux desktop than there was with X, which is unilaterally a bad thing.
    - akvadrako 6y ago
      The Wayland base can be implemented in a library, like wlroots, which complete compositors could use. Currently compositor developers prefer separate implementations and it's really their choice.
      - jcelerier 6y ago
        the fact that the system provides a choice is the issue that leads to fragmentation (which is the main problem). Saying "people could just do / not do X" absolutely never ever ever works, not in politics, not in programming, not in "not being an asshole to each other", not in "not using firearms", etc - things have to be enforced & unescapable at some point if we want sanity.
        ywei3410 6y ago
        I’m not entirely sure that I understand your point. Here are the facts which I think we can agree on. * X11 is a protocol * Wayland is a protocol * X11 and Wayland are not compatible protocols * Wayland protocols are all public * XOrg is an implementation of the compositor of the X11 protocol * wl_roots is a toolkit used for creating compositors From this, it follows that: * Anyone can theoretically write another X11 compositor which implements a subset of the functionality * Anyone can write a Wayland compositor which implements a subset of the functionality I really don’t understand where this supposed extra fragmentation is coming from — unless your objection is that we have more than one Wayland compositor? I don’t see that as a particularly bad; in the same way I don’t see having GNOME, i3 and XFCE existing is necessarily problematic.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  Wayland is a protocol, like X. X.org is an implementation, like a compositor. Screenshots require a privileged application to have access to the whole screen. The X protocol doesn’t provide that, though some implementation might.

jcelerier 6y ago

> screenshots don't work – they do. I use them all the time. they don't work on wayland, they work on specific compositors that implement an extension.

m4rtink 6y ago
Are there even any Wayland compositors in actual use that don't support that extension?
- jcelerier 6y ago
  if you go to r/unixporn there are a ton of custom X11 WMs with very very small userbase - sometimes a dozen individuals. Screenshotting works with all of them.
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    WMs are not compositors. Compositors are more like a WM combined with X.org.
    - jcelerier 6y ago
      yes, that's the issue - writing a different desktop metaphor like the various tiling WMs was something that took as few as a couple hundred lines of C. Now with Wayland the person who wants to write his own desktop environment has to rewrite much more to get to something that doesn't even provide half of what Xorg gives. Also, compositors are not mandatory anyways on X (I don't use one personnally and prefer it like that) so it's a weird remark to make.
ywei3410 6y ago
While technically correct, this misses the point. Very few features are part of the core Wayland protocol; off the top of my bind, there's the input methods, and a few ways to describe shared memory with the compositor and some callbacks to handle device registration. That's it. For example, top level windows and popups themselves are an extension in Wayland (xdg_shell protocol rather than the defunct wl_shell), and so is the rather basic feature of compositing on the GPU (dma_buf) rather than going through some shared CPU memory.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > Very few features are part of the core Wayland protocol; but that is the main critique. Most of the things not being part of core means that there is a lot more fragmentation of the linux desktop than there was with X, which is unilaterally a bad thing.
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    The Wayland base can be implemented in a library, like wlroots, which complete compositors could use. Currently compositor developers prefer separate implementations and it's really their choice.
    - jcelerier 6y ago
      the fact that the system provides a choice is the issue that leads to fragmentation (which is the main problem). Saying "people could just do / not do X" absolutely never ever ever works, not in politics, not in programming, not in "not being an asshole to each other", not in "not using firearms", etc - things have to be enforced & unescapable at some point if we want sanity.
      - ywei3410 6y ago
        I’m not entirely sure that I understand your point. Here are the facts which I think we can agree on. * X11 is a protocol * Wayland is a protocol * X11 and Wayland are not compatible protocols * Wayland protocols are all public * XOrg is an implementation of the compositor of the X11 protocol * wl_roots is a toolkit used for creating compositors From this, it follows that: * Anyone can theoretically write another X11 compositor which implements a subset of the functionality * Anyone can write a Wayland compositor which implements a subset of the functionality I really don’t understand where this supposed extra fragmentation is coming from — unless your objection is that we have more than one Wayland compositor? I don’t see that as a particularly bad; in the same way I don’t see having GNOME, i3 and XFCE existing is necessarily problematic.
akvadrako 6y ago
Wayland is a protocol, like X. X.org is an implementation, like a compositor. Screenshots require a privileged application to have access to the whole screen. The X protocol doesn’t provide that, though some implementation might.