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Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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I love how people are complaining about Wayland not being ready or being unstable (whatever that even means, because it's a protocol), while it's the default on both GNOME and Plasma now, which combined probably run on more than 50% of Linux desktops these days.
And not only that, but Cinnamon, Xfce and others want to follow, so very clearly people who know a fair bit about desktops seem to disagree with Wayland being "not ready".
I think it kills the community. Making a Wayland window manager is so much harder to do than an X one. This monolithic solution solves the problems of Gnome, and KDE developers but less people want to be involved in windowing systems. I'm just being sad for X11, because, although it had nonsense features, it made linux desktop applications compatible with every desktop and we had huge variety of wms, compositors, desktop environments. Personally I'm still on X because of bspwm, but eventually there will be wayland-only features which will slowly kill X.
There's libraries like wl-roots that make it a lot easier, no?
well, yes, but for e.g. I wrote a software piece that happened to be only a hotkey daemon. And I could write it with X. Now, hotkey daemons are no longer a separate thing unless the compositor exposes a grab API. Which never going to be in Wayland protocol, because they consider this client server architecture a problem.
I think this is intentional. Call me paranoid.
Elaboration: we have seen in the past how RedHat's and others' policies would always not reach some part of Linux users, and those users still wouldn't feel as second class citizens - it was just a matter of choice and configuration to avoid PulseAudio, systemd, Gnome 3, one can go on. That was mostly connected to escaping major environments and same applications working the same with all of them. Wayland, while not outright making Gnome the only thing to work, creates a barrier and doesn't make that a firm given anymore.
It won't be too long until using Linux without Wayland will cut you off from many things developed with corporate input - and that's developers' time paid as opposed to donated for or volunteered, so much more effort.
Now, there was a time when there weren't that much corporate input and still things would get done. But it will be hard to fall back to it, when the whole environment, one can say, ecosystem, is so complex and corporate-dependent.
I would say this is the time of all those corps whose investment into Linux was so nice in 00s and 10s reaping what they sowed. This wasn't all for free or to profit on paid support. And people who thought that it's GPL that was such a nice license that "forced" corps to participate in FOSS projects they benefit from, with those projects remaining FOSS, are going to have to face reality.
Fat years are ending, so they are going to capitalize on their investments.
This has already happened with the Web 10 or more years ago, when Facebook, Google and others have suddenly gone Hitler, while now they are in terminal stages of enshittification.
Same process.
You can disagree, no need to insult me.
Now instead of having Wayland covering everything, applications try to cover every desktops. In the good old times, it worked everywhere.
Why does flameshot need to handle different wayland desktops separately? Because simply the protocol doesn't do it's job. It doesn't cover everything. It's indeed not ready.
It won’t need to for much longer. The protocol for screen capture was merged weeks ago.
There's hope. Thanks for letting me know.