Making it a part of Wayland would not have accomplished much. If the desktops really couldn't agree on a common protocol then you would end up with a bad standa

Making it a part of Wayland would not have accomplished much. If the desktops really couldn't agree on a common protocol then you would end up with a bad standard that no desktop implements. See wl_shell for another reason why doing this in the core protocol would have likely been a mistake. I don't know who was painting it as a security issue but they're mostly wrong. The security issue is in restricting use of those capabilities to only privileged applications. Maybe other (embedded?) compositors left that out entirely for security reasons, but GNOME and KDE always had plans to include screenshots, and wlroots has it too. Weston even had its screenshooter protocol for a while now but the other desktops decided not to use it and went their own way, for various reasons. (Full-featured screen capture is actually not as simple as you'd think, and it gets messier when pipewire and zero-copy capturing are on the table) Edit: Check here for some background https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/32 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/32