Damn that 30 year old protocol for sneaking up on people.
These just-so stories are easy to write, harder to write convincingly. I gladly use Wayland because I’m in a mixed-DPI setup, and didn’t rely on anything that broke. But loads of people are still pissed off due to persistent incompatibility.
The way Wayland made everything the responsibility of non-existent compositors really fucked over anyone not using GNOME or KDE, basically.
It is a different ecosystem. It requires time to mature and yes, you have to migrate to it in order to use it.
Moving to Wayland was a bit like moving to a different operating system from an application point of view. The toolkits made that reasonably easy for most apps but they really do not help much if you are the window manager.
So yes, compositors had to be built. This was easy enough for the big projects like GNOME and KDE but a bigger ask for smaller players. But there are lots now: GNOME, Plasma, Hyprland, MangoWC, Niri, COSMIC, Budgie, LxQT, LabWC, Wayfire, Sway, DWL, River, Wayland Maker, etc. I am sure there are many more I don’t know or forgot. There will be lots more.
And yes, a Wayland compositor is a bit like the X server and window manager combined. So, they are harder to build. Except libraries have appeared to do that. There are wlroots, Smithay, aquamarine, Louvre, and SWC. There will be more. So, a Wayland compositor is not really that much harder anymore. And it will get easier.
The XFCE project is just starting a Wayland compositor project now. It will be built mostly by a single developer. They think they will have a dev release in a few months. They are using Smithay.
Building the Wayland ecosystem took time. But we are basically there. And it is only going to get bigger and better.
The transition would have been a lot less acrimonious if it had been attempted after wlroots was usable, or if people working on Wayland itself had made an effort to write something like wlroots.
It’s fine. There’s still some quirks with Wayland I don’t like. Either having to be in a game or have Discord focused in order for push to talk to work for example. Some mouse constraint issues with certain games that for whatever reason KDE has been able to figure out but every other wayland compositor hasn’t.
Just in case it helps:
My Discord keybinds were having a struggle when I used 3rd party apps like armcord and vesktop. The actual Discord bin program is doing global keybinds correctly for my toggle mute microphone on my keyboard.
I use the Discord Nix pkg, not armcord or vesktop. I’ve always had this issue be it on arch, nixos, or fedora. I’m starting to lean towards “user error” as I just must not have something set up right. but yeah I’ve never used armcord, vencord, or vesktop.
it’s absolutely not fine. You as a user, should be able to access the content of any window on your machine.
By that, do you mean that every program running with your user privileges should be able to access the content of every window on your machine?
Wayland is pure trash. It’s written like an Android App. Just short-sighted garbage.
Who said it will kill desktops? X11 desktops still work fine. And some specific tools like screen recorders are not workflows. Wayland had issues with some tools, those get solved and some people use it and are happy with it. Other people don’t use it and are equally happy. Why try to invent some apocalypse when there’s none?
X11 desktops work fine and will continue to work fine. But very few people will be using them in 5 years.
I don’t know who cares. I will use X11 as long as it does everything I need it to do. I will switch when I have to do something that can only be done in Wayland. Doing anything else is just chasing fads or being stubborn.
