3 ms·

Wayland doesn't say "this is impossible", it says "this is out of scope of the core display protocol, implement this somewhere else". Which, well, we do. Pract

Wayland doesn't say "this is impossible", it says "this is out of scope of the core display protocol, implement this somewhere else". Which, well, we do. Practically all the X usecases are covered on Wayland systems now. Screen sharing, screen clipping, global hotkeys, file pickers, getting the window title like you said... I can do all of that on KDE, right now, under Wayland.

mikkupikku 11mo ago
Can you do it in a way that isn't KDE specific, and will work if you change your DE one day on a whim?
- tuna74 11mo ago
  If you change to another DE that has less capabilities than KDE, of course you can't do it. Emacs and LibreOffice Writer will have vastly different capabilities and people can choose what they want based on the capabilities they desire.
  - rcxdude 11mo ago
    That's the issue. Because wayland punts on so much functionality that used to be available with standard interfaces in X11, it fragments the ecosystem to such a degree that all these useful little utilities just don't really have a means to grow.
  - ethin 11mo ago
    And that is exactly the problem. Now things like accessibility (or, really, any feature that the maintainers of the core protocol didn't think were "necessary" because they like minimalism) have to be implemented by each and every compositor. If the compositor doesn't implement it, your screwed unless either you convince them to add it or you add it yourself. Talk about causing huge amounts of fragmentation for absolutely no reason. The proper thing Wayland should've done is waited until Wayland had reached feature parity with X, then released it to the world and started acting like it's the future.
    - gf000 11mo ago
      If I have a kiosk terminal, why would I want the overhead of, say, screensharing? Also, isn't this the point of libraries, so that you only have to implement stuff once, and you can reuse it in different projects? Like you can build on top of wlroots just fine. > The proper thing Wayland should've done is waited until Wayland had reached feature parity with X How on Earth would you expect a fundamental protocol to be developed behind closed doors?! Wtf even.
      - ethin 11mo ago
        > If I have a kiosk terminal, why would I want the overhead of, say, screensharing? Also, isn't this the point of libraries, so that you only have to implement stuff once, and you can reuse it in different projects? Like you can build on top of wlroots just fine. Yeah but again this fragments the ecosystem massively. If people really wanted flexibility they could've just made it a configure option or something equivalent? > How on Earth would you expect a fundamental protocol to be developed behind closed doors?! Wtf even. Your making a pretty big assumption here, aren't you? I never said it had to be developed behind closed doors. It's the "lets just obsolete X11 even though Wayland can't even replicate a quarter of it's functionality right now now now because of security security security" that irritates me. If they had worked on Wayland and obsoleted it once they had reached feature parity, that would be releasing it to the world. Then they would've had far less friction and the transition would've been a lot smoother. Would it have delayed Wayland by maybe a decade? Sure, but I see little issue with that. IMO that probably would've made Wayland even better.
        gf000 11mo ago
        Who is the supposed agent mastermind singlehandedly developing Wayland and deprecating X11? You do realize there are multiple people working (having worked) on both in their free time and each have agency and their own incentives. Separate people have had enough of maintaining X, while another group of people enjoyed working on Wayland. Some indeed moved from one to another but there were no coordinated attempt at hijacking the Linux graphic stack or whatever..
  - yjftsjthsd-h 11mo ago
    > If you change to another DE that has less capabilities than KDE, of course you can't do it It's not inherent. If I change to another X DE, I can keep all my other programs and the features they implement.
- dev_hugepages 11mo ago
  :(
LtWorf 11mo ago
As I understand, blind people can't use wayland right now.
- ethin 11mo ago
  I know some blind people who tolerate it but yeah, I find it completely unusable at the moment. I haven't tried Gnome recently but last time I tried it I had apps like Bitwarden malfunctioning in some very, very weird ways that just... Never happened on Xorg. If I remember right, it was things like forms not being read properly or something, can't remember off the top of my head now. But it certainly didn't leave me with a good impression; it made me think this Wayland thing was just half-baked. Also, Orca modifiers were passed-through directly to the compositor and Orca wasn't allowed to intercept them either, which made just using my computer feel awkward since I'd always need to remember to turn off caps lock every time I wanted to do something even remotely complicated. I've heard that Gnome has solved this but as I said above, I think this may be a Gnome (and at most KDE) thing, and not something that everybody has decided to just do.
lelanthran 11mo ago
> Practically all the X usecases are covered on Wayland systems now. ... global hotkeys ... Are you sure? I looked at that earlier this year for a personal tool I wanted to create and found no way to do it on Wayland (On X, I did it just fine). I had a long back and forth about this very thing with both Claude and ChatGPT, and neither conversation was fruitful: every option had some dependency (like switching to KDE, or similar).

mikkupikku 11mo ago

Can you do it in a way that isn't KDE specific, and will work if you change your DE one day on a whim?

tuna74 11mo ago
If you change to another DE that has less capabilities than KDE, of course you can't do it. Emacs and LibreOffice Writer will have vastly different capabilities and people can choose what they want based on the capabilities they desire.
- rcxdude 11mo ago
  That's the issue. Because wayland punts on so much functionality that used to be available with standard interfaces in X11, it fragments the ecosystem to such a degree that all these useful little utilities just don't really have a means to grow.
- ethin 11mo ago
  And that is exactly the problem. Now things like accessibility (or, really, any feature that the maintainers of the core protocol didn't think were "necessary" because they like minimalism) have to be implemented by each and every compositor. If the compositor doesn't implement it, your screwed unless either you convince them to add it or you add it yourself. Talk about causing huge amounts of fragmentation for absolutely no reason. The proper thing Wayland should've done is waited until Wayland had reached feature parity with X, then released it to the world and started acting like it's the future.
  - gf000 11mo ago
    If I have a kiosk terminal, why would I want the overhead of, say, screensharing? Also, isn't this the point of libraries, so that you only have to implement stuff once, and you can reuse it in different projects? Like you can build on top of wlroots just fine. > The proper thing Wayland should've done is waited until Wayland had reached feature parity with X How on Earth would you expect a fundamental protocol to be developed behind closed doors?! Wtf even.
    - ethin 11mo ago
      > If I have a kiosk terminal, why would I want the overhead of, say, screensharing? Also, isn't this the point of libraries, so that you only have to implement stuff once, and you can reuse it in different projects? Like you can build on top of wlroots just fine. Yeah but again this fragments the ecosystem massively. If people really wanted flexibility they could've just made it a configure option or something equivalent? > How on Earth would you expect a fundamental protocol to be developed behind closed doors?! Wtf even. Your making a pretty big assumption here, aren't you? I never said it had to be developed behind closed doors. It's the "lets just obsolete X11 even though Wayland can't even replicate a quarter of it's functionality right now now now because of security security security" that irritates me. If they had worked on Wayland and obsoleted it once they had reached feature parity, that would be releasing it to the world. Then they would've had far less friction and the transition would've been a lot smoother. Would it have delayed Wayland by maybe a decade? Sure, but I see little issue with that. IMO that probably would've made Wayland even better.
      - gf000 11mo ago
        Who is the supposed agent mastermind singlehandedly developing Wayland and deprecating X11? You do realize there are multiple people working (having worked) on both in their free time and each have agency and their own incentives. Separate people have had enough of maintaining X, while another group of people enjoyed working on Wayland. Some indeed moved from one to another but there were no coordinated attempt at hijacking the Linux graphic stack or whatever..
- yjftsjthsd-h 11mo ago
  > If you change to another DE that has less capabilities than KDE, of course you can't do it It's not inherent. If I change to another X DE, I can keep all my other programs and the features they implement.
dev_hugepages 11mo ago
:(

LtWorf 11mo ago

As I understand, blind people can't use wayland right now.

ethin 11mo ago
I know some blind people who tolerate it but yeah, I find it completely unusable at the moment. I haven't tried Gnome recently but last time I tried it I had apps like Bitwarden malfunctioning in some very, very weird ways that just... Never happened on Xorg. If I remember right, it was things like forms not being read properly or something, can't remember off the top of my head now. But it certainly didn't leave me with a good impression; it made me think this Wayland thing was just half-baked. Also, Orca modifiers were passed-through directly to the compositor and Orca wasn't allowed to intercept them either, which made just using my computer feel awkward since I'd always need to remember to turn off caps lock every time I wanted to do something even remotely complicated. I've heard that Gnome has solved this but as I said above, I think this may be a Gnome (and at most KDE) thing, and not something that everybody has decided to just do.

lelanthran 11mo ago

> Practically all the X usecases are covered on Wayland systems now. ... global hotkeys ... Are you sure? I looked at that earlier this year for a personal tool I wanted to create and found no way to do it on Wayland (On X, I did it just fine). I had a long back and forth about this very thing with both Claude and ChatGPT, and neither conversation was fruitful: every option had some dependency (like switching to KDE, or similar).