Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
I think having separate standard APIs for screenshots, screen capture, and video capture that aren’t married to one implementation makes sense.
I partially agree about the focus on containers/sandboxes. Yes, it makes sense to criticize that something designed for a different use case results in different trade-offs. But on the other hand, are the use cases really that different? We’re talking about standalone desktop apps, they need some common building blocks no matter if they’re containerized or not, right?
Otherwise I don’t know enough about the standards to comment there, you’re probably right!
The idea of a using a separate thing for it is fine, in itself, but necessitating it is an issue to me. There are a LOT of wayland compositors now, for all sorts of systems, each one also new needs a compatible xdg portals implementation (or whatever third party tool you like), in the case of xdg portals this also means pulling in things like dbus. It actually becomes a lot to build a “Minimal but fledged out” ecosystem. something which should otherwise be possible.
sure but then you have xdg-portals denying actually useful a11y protocols because they “don’t want to expose it to containers” -_- apparently they never heard of a permissions system? but this also highlights why the wayland ecosystem right now is so poor for select individuals (and why they get heated when told that they need to swap to wayland)