When I get bored with the conversation/tired of arguing I will simply tersely agree with you and then stop responding. I’m too old for this stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • And can you not see how that’s a problem? Software that was written without using XDG portals shouldn’t have to be concerned about their existence. If it is required that existing, finished software has to adapt to a new paradigm, it is not a replacement - it’s new. And it’s intrusive. If you replace the water system for a house, that’s one thing. If you replace the water system in the house AND the new system requires the owner to buy and install all new fixtures on all the faucets, that’s an entirely different thing altogether.


  • Quite simply, you can draw and annotate the screen. I can circle things, draw attention to things, and highlight things on every window in the desktop environment without ANY consideration of what application is running - it’s completely agnostic. Wayland’s design doesn’t allow it.

    Until this feature is present, Wayland is unusable for me.

    This kind of thing is precisely why the overall decision to replace X by building something NEW was folly from the beginning - because you are ALWAYS going to be missing use cases. X should’ve been treated like an API and “completion” be measured directly and terms of how much of the functionality is implemented - not in terms of “how much, in fuzzy natural language terms, do we have that works equivalently”.

    Also, and let’s be entirely clear about this… Open Board got here FIRST. It was FINISHED software. Developed, released, and doing its job. To come along, make a change to its dependencies, and then blame IT for doing something wrong? Is it the job of every single developer to update their software to match what Wayland wants? Thousands of projects over decades? What happens when the Wayland devs make another change and something else breaks? I’m getting flashbacks of Linus Torvalds RIGHTFULLY yelling at a developer blaming an application for not functioning after a kernel update. “WE DO NOT BREAK USER SPACE.”

    Android forces developers to make these kinds of retroactive changes, and it’s why the ecosystem sucks and any stable, well-built software is a couple updates away from being useless. I don’t want my desktop OS to be more like that.




  • I appreciate the information, and I’m willing to give it a shot again when I next need to do a distro switch or a new installation, but until now my experiences with Wayland have basically been a stream of broken things over several days as I try to reestablish my workflow in a new desktop environment. The time it all goes successfully is the time I’ll be sold.



  • Like I said, I use Linux in my classroom, and I heavily use global shortcut keys set via script for individual lessons, with fullscreen opening of applications that don’t have automatic support and shortcut key based window switching all without mouse input to create a seamless presentation for my students.

    Global shortcuts and wmctrl, which form the critical backbones of this system, simply don’t work in Wayland.

    And to suggest it’s just a perfect transition is wrong. I don’t use Steam Link, but if I did? Doesn’t work in Wayland. Everyone constantly bemoans that applications should be rewritten for Wayland, but one of Linux’s advantages is eternal backwards compatibility so software can actually be FINISHED.

    Wayland isn’t the kernel and it shouldn’t be held to the standard of the Linux kernel, but do you remember when Linus Torvalds publicly screamed at and berated a developer for a change to the kernel that broke a userspace application and then having the sheer GALL to suggest the application developer was at fault? Wayland evangelists could stand to be a little more understanding that people don’t like it when you break functional userspace applications, force developers to work on stuff that is FINISHED to get it working again, and then blame them for not getting on board with your changes. You know who does that? Google.

    Look, Wayland works for you and that’s fantastic. Use whatever you like. Linux is Linux and one of the most beautiful points of Linux is freedom of choice. What I take exception to is the people in this thread who are acting like anybody who isn’t on Wayland is crazy and insisting there’s no good reason to still be on X11 just because they personally don’t understand why someone would need features they need. Anyone expounding that “Wayland is a 1 to 1 replacement for X11 and superior in every way!” is either being intentionally disingenous or a cultist. You know who insists users are wrong for having their own use cases and workflow and wants them to change to their preferred system because THEY don’t think the other use cases matter? Microsoft.

    I’ll be happy to make the switch to Wayland… when I do a system install or update and it happens invisibly and I don’t suddenly have to wonder why all of my custom scripts no longer work.


  • It’s not that I have issues - it works just fine in the domain it’s designed for. It’s that the Wayland system does not provide feature parity with X11. I make extensive use of window manipulation using xdotool and wmctrl for my daily use case, and those are both unsupported on Wayland. It’s a fine system for users whose use case fit with its design. It is not a feature complete replacement for X11.


  • I’ll never make the claim that X11 is perfect, but my use case requires features that are either not built into Wayland yet or simply won’t be built into it in the future.

    I’m sure it’s a fine product, but asking me to change my workflow to use it is a non-starter. When it reaches feature complete support of X11 functionality, I’ll consider changing.