this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Every time I learn more about what Wayland can't do, I learn of even more critical stuff that doesn't work
no screenshots? really? who approved this trashfire as default. That's about as ridiculous as no global hotkeys
That's not what Wayland is like these days - screenshots etc have been implemented for years now
The point they're making is that, as a totally distinct project, every single feature had to be implemented from scratch. It's not a fast process, especially relying on volunteer labour
The issue isn't just that the features had to be reimplemented, but that they were not part of Wayland to begin with. Wayland does only do the most basic stuff and leaves everything else to the compositor (aka Gnome or KDE). That means every compositor will implement their own hacky version of the missing functionality and it takes ages until that gets unified again, so that apps can actually use that functionality.
Wayland is a classic case of an underspecified software project, they do a thing and they might even do it well, but what they are doing is only a fraction of what is actually needed for it to work properly in the real world. That's why we are 15 years later and the new "simpler" Wayland is still not ready.
It seems very well specified to me, just developers have leaned on X's insecurity for years to let them just reach across application boundaries freely. That's addressed by Wayland, but it's obviously a breaking change that requires new ways of transferring information between apps with oversight from the system, instead of X where all apps could just freely spy on each other. Things breaking and being complex to reimplement is the cost of doing it right.