cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/23486789
This full packed release comes with three new staging protocols:
system bell - allowing e.g. terminal emulators to hand off system bell alerts to the compositor for among other things accessibility purposes
fifo - for implementing first in first out surface content update behavior
commit timing - for adding time constraints to surface content update
Other than this, the presentation timing protocol protocol got a version minor bump describing how to deal with variable refresh rate.
Other protocols saw the regular clarifications and bug fixes, and some deprecated events is now properly indicated as such in the XML. Please see individual commits for details.
Wake me when they add screen grab.
What do you mean by “screen grab”?
FizzyOrange got it right. “Screen grab” is nicely asking a graphical system (X11/xorg-server or a Wayland compositor or whatever) via an api to give you an image of either the whole desktop or some particular rectangular part of it. And you can do it 30 times every second (or more) to get a video. OBS uses such APIs to get video from the screen for saving to a file or streaming to Twitch or whatever. Various tools can be used to get screenshots and save them to files. Etc.
Heck. On my work machine, because they require us to meticulously log the time we spend on individual tasks, I’ve got a script running that uses ImageMagick’s
importcommand to grab screenshots of my desktop and save them to files once every 5 minutes so I can refer back to them while logging my time.And as FizzyOrange said, various Wayland compositors have workarounds for the fact that there isn’t (or rather wasn’t until recently) a way to do screen grab in a standard way that would work across all compositors which properly and comprehensively implement the Wayland protocol. I use Sway on my personal machines and it’s based on something called
wlrootswhich has built-in a nonstandard extension to the Wayland protocol that allows screen grab. But oncewlrootsadopts the new standard way of doing screen grabbing, the nonstandard extension will be unneeded/obsolete.Screenshots. Print screen. Wayland famously doesn’t have a way to do this very basic task (all of the desktop environments had to add custom extensions).
Seems like they finally did it though really recently. And it only took 12 years!
Oh shit! I hadn’t heard they’d finally added that. That’s awesome.
Maybe that means FFMPEG and Zoom will start supporting it soon.
On my personal systems, I use Sway (a Wayland compositor). And I sometimes wish I could do screen grab with FFMPEG, but so far I haven’t wanted that enough to actually switch to X11 or use wl-screenrec.
On my work machine, I’m on Ubuntu and I have to use Zoom and screen sharing is kindof a non-negotiable thing. (Plus, FFMPEG screen grab is nice to have on my work machine as well.) So I use i3-gaps on xorg-server. Except for those two things, I’d rather use Sway.