[qnxub]

Once you realize that Wayland is essentially a GNOME project, it will all make sense. Take for example how windows have to draw their own decorations. That's a GNOME-ism.

If Wayland is the future of the Linux desktop, it would seem that there will be one true reference compositor (GNOME's Mutter) with a number of other projects struggling to adapt to the various gaps left by Wayland's incompleteness.

For example, screen sharing on Zoom works with GNOME Wayland but not the other compositors because it targets a GNOME API. If the Linux desktop starts to fracture, what's the incentive to bring support to your less common WM/compositor?

[hakfoo]

The "big desktop" concept always felt a little weird to me-- derived from the era where we people freaking out about the license status of KDE/Qt and using that to justify the entire GNOME ecosystem.

It's completely unlike the traditional Unix/X11 model-- here's an entire suite of toolkits and software, and you can pick best-of-breed. If you want to style it all to look similar, tooling exists. If you want your word processor to follow GTK conventions and your web browser to look like Motif, more power to you.

I feel like the original "desktop" model was to provide a basic subset of software with a consistent look and feel-- more or less getting you to feature-parity with the pack-in software in a Windows 95 install. It's realistically the upper bound on what can be offered.

If you go bigger-- as GNOME is doing by hitting the windowing infrastructure itself-- you're asking to support and rebuild the entire world in your image. You also create a hostility with the rest of the universe. I've tended to avoid GNOME/KDE related utilities because I don't want to turn "oh, here's one cool package I want" into 45 minutes of pulling an entire desktop environment down to support it. And that's with abundant resources to spare-- if I was fitting stuff on a first-generation Raspberry Pi with a tiny storage card, it's a complete showstopper.

[smoldesu]

Yes!!! So many people are utterly oblivious to this, and the number of people I see trying to defend this as a "community project" worries me. Make no mistake: Wayland (much like GTK4 and libadwaita) is another piece of software designed to give the GNOME foundation leverage. Perhaps the insult to the injury is that even with ownership of large components of desktop Linux, the GNOME foundation refuses to create a complete desktop.

[akagusu]

Not only Wayland and GTK, but systemd, flatpak and basically all "standards" shipped from freedesktop.org, mainly sponsored by one company: Red Hat.

The problem is not only people think on these projects like "community projects", but the developers that build software upon GTK and the GNOME stack, because they know GNOME Foundation doesn't not care about 3rd party devs.