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The Wayland developers do this because they absolutely do not want to be involved in the perpetual fights between desktops. Getting into that is a lose-lose pro

The Wayland developers do this because they absolutely do not want to be involved in the perpetual fights between desktops. Getting into that is a lose-lose proposition. So they focus only on the small subset of things that every desktop agrees on. Users that aren't actively working on an implementation in a desktop unfortunately don't have any place in this discussion, practically they just have nothing meaningful to contribute. It's not feasible without some implementation "sponsoring" the relevant code. Piling more features into upstream Wayland to please these users is not going to help anything, the implementations will not be able to use it and it will just complicate things for no gain and create more fragmentation. This is not specifically a Wayland thing, it was also the case in the X server if you were developing a new extension, you needed to gather feedback from the WM implementations before doing anything. If you want to make it easier to develop alternatives to GNOME, it would be best to start putting more reusable features into libraries, and getting all desktops (including GNOME) to use them. That way you have a common baseline that everyone can depend on. That may seem counter-intuitive but it is the only way, libraries provide implementations and it is actually the implementations themselves that are the important part to users, not anything that upstream is doing. The simplest example is something like Mesa. All the Wayland servers want to support hardware acceleration, so they all implement the relevant extensions, and then they're able to support applications that talk using the Mesa libraries.

wink 4y ago
You've nailed the point and failed to get to the right conclusion. > So they focus only on the small subset of things that every desktop agrees on It's the old "but I can't do screenshots or screen sharing" again. The desktop may agree on this, but 90% of the users are like "I don't care, just make it work" - and by catering to what desktops agree on and completely ignoring things that at least some good percentage of every desktop will use, they kinda made a mess. It might be an architecturally superior mess but not even the people who have been tinkering with their Linux boxes for 20 years seem enthusiastic about wayland. Not everyone wants to first implement features in their window manager of choice.
- Crysstalis 4y ago
  >It's the old "but I can't do screenshots or screen sharing" again. I don't know what this refers to. The screenshots and screensharing are done through the xdg portal and pipewire. That's as "standard" as something across desktops can be, but like I said it just is done in a separate library/daemon rather than being in wayland upstream. You don't need to really implement anything in your window manager of choice if you already have support for those, you just use pipewire. They all agree on it. The implementations haven't ignored this, you're telling me I didn't get to the right conclusion but your conclusion is to just keep barking up the wrong tree and hope they change their mind, when they have even less incentive to do that now because the feature is already implemented elsewhere in a much better way. >but not even the people who have been tinkering with their Linux boxes for 20 years seem enthusiastic about wayland I don't consider this to be a problem. The tinkerers get most excited when you hand them something with a giant config file (e.g. xorg.conf) with every option under the sun that they can tweak and watch it fall apart. Most upstream maintainers I've talked to would very much like to get rid of these giant config files because they are completely untestable and unmaintainable. The tinkerers cannot have their cake and eat it too.
  - wink 4y ago
    Not really, I'm just saying I know enough people who are usually enthusiastic and knowledgeable and they still try out wayland once a month or so and it's always "oh, found 3 thing that don't work" and go back. They're not excited if they have to fix dualscreen working or something so basic.

wink 4y ago

You've nailed the point and failed to get to the right conclusion. > So they focus only on the small subset of things that every desktop agrees on It's the old "but I can't do screenshots or screen sharing" again. The desktop may agree on this, but 90% of the users are like "I don't care, just make it work" - and by catering to what desktops agree on and completely ignoring things that at least some good percentage of every desktop will use, they kinda made a mess. It might be an architecturally superior mess but not even the people who have been tinkering with their Linux boxes for 20 years seem enthusiastic about wayland. Not everyone wants to first implement features in their window manager of choice.

Crysstalis 4y ago
>It's the old "but I can't do screenshots or screen sharing" again. I don't know what this refers to. The screenshots and screensharing are done through the xdg portal and pipewire. That's as "standard" as something across desktops can be, but like I said it just is done in a separate library/daemon rather than being in wayland upstream. You don't need to really implement anything in your window manager of choice if you already have support for those, you just use pipewire. They all agree on it. The implementations haven't ignored this, you're telling me I didn't get to the right conclusion but your conclusion is to just keep barking up the wrong tree and hope they change their mind, when they have even less incentive to do that now because the feature is already implemented elsewhere in a much better way. >but not even the people who have been tinkering with their Linux boxes for 20 years seem enthusiastic about wayland I don't consider this to be a problem. The tinkerers get most excited when you hand them something with a giant config file (e.g. xorg.conf) with every option under the sun that they can tweak and watch it fall apart. Most upstream maintainers I've talked to would very much like to get rid of these giant config files because they are completely untestable and unmaintainable. The tinkerers cannot have their cake and eat it too.
- wink 4y ago
  Not really, I'm just saying I know enough people who are usually enthusiastic and knowledgeable and they still try out wayland once a month or so and it's always "oh, found 3 thing that don't work" and go back. They're not excited if they have to fix dualscreen working or something so basic.