[ccakes]

This is a great project! I like and use Wayland but the portal protocols and extension mechanism does leave a lot to be desired. Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need

An X11 rewrite with some security baked in is an awesome approach. Will be watching!

[drpixie]

I thought for a long time that rather than move to Wayland, we could come up with a tidied-up version of X. Sounds like a good and useful project, I hope it progresses.

[reactordev]

I thought this too and originally thought that’s what Wayland was going to do but it went off and did its own thing.

I’m all for an X12.

[viraptor]

It was always an option, but "just" needed someone to dedicate all their time to it and pull in a group of long term maintainers. The real question is what will happen with the project in 2 years and will it be stable for day to day use.

[reppap]

I don't really understand what is supposedly missing in Wayland for productivity users? At work I have been using gnome with the wayland backend for years at this point and I can't really figure out anything that's missing.

[sillystuff]

Accessibility is apparently a big problem with wayland. E.g., the most popular / ?only? app that supports hardware eye trackers on Linux does not work with wayland, and states that it likely never will as wayland does not provide what it needs to add support (it is also the most popular app for voice/noise control). Even basic things like screen readers are apparently still an issue with wayland. Without a strong accessibility story, systems running wayland would have been banned at my last employer (a college).

Personally, I have a 3200x2400 e-ink monitor that has a bezel that covers the outer few columns of pixels. I use a custom modeline to exclude those columns from use. And, a fractional scaling of .603x.5 on this now 3184x2400 monitor to get 1920x1200 effective resolution. Zero idea how to accomplish this with wayland-- I do not think it is possible, but if anyone knows a way, I am all ears.

I ran into, at least, ten issues without solutions/work-arounds (like the issue with my monitor) when I tried to switch this year, after getting a new laptop. Reverted to a functional, and productively familiar, setup with X.

[foxrider]

The xdg-desktop-portal stuff is still too immature. For example, my friend wanted my help after upgrading his Pop_OS to 24.04, and 24.04 replaced GNOME with COSMIC. COSMI had no RemoteDesktop portal (and still doesn't have it), so we couldn't use RustDesk like we always did without him installing a GNOME session just for that.

I've been an i3 user for almost two decades, but eventually switched to Sway - to this day there's no InputCapture portal, so I can't use Synergy with Sway, forcing me to switch to i3 while I'm working.

It's been over 10 years of things like that. There's always SOMETHING missing.

[phito]

Screenshots are just completely broken. People always tell me to use other apps like flameshot but IME it just doesn't work and I don't want to have to mess around so much to take screenshots.

I'm still using Wayland because it's what came with my distro (endeavour OS, gnome), but it's really strange how it came broken out of the box.

[MrDrMcCoy]

Headless remote desktop, at least for KDE, is very much not possible today as far as I can tell. It's the last thing I miss from Xorg.

[linsomniac]

>what is supposedly missing in Wayland

My desktop is a bit long in the tooth (22.04), but I've long given up on trying to screen shot or screen share from Wayland. I have my Macbook sitting next to it and use it for those things, where it works basically flawlessly.

Kind of waiting for 26.04 to upgrade at this point, but I'm not really expecting any of this to be better yet.

edit: If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have gone Wayland at 22.04.

[OsrsNeedsf2P]

Autoclickers and screen macros on Wayland are all janky

[nish__]

> Wayland is still quite a way behind Windows and macOS in terms of what productivity users need

What's missing?

[gen2brain]

Window positioning? You cannot position the window, you cannot send a hint, nothing? So my pop-up with GTK4 will randomly be placed somewhere, anywhere, without any control. OK, GTK4 went further and also removed popups without the parent, so you hack that with an invisible anchor window and then write platform-specific code for sane platforms that CAN, of course, move the window. And let's not talk about window icons that you have to put somewhere on the file system?

[quantummagic]

Ads in the start menu, forced screenshotting of all your activity, and AI integration in every aspect of the desktop experience.

[redeeman]

BS, windows and macos cant even do proper window managing for a start, and then it just goes downwards from there on.. You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default.

If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop. If you go 15 years back, even way more so.

even in the early 2000s, windows was so hilariously crappy that you had to make floppy disks to even get to install the thing. If PCs didnt come preloaded with windows, regular users would never ever be able to install it, versus the relative ease a typical linux distribution was to install. This is also one of the large reasons that when their windows slowed down due to being a piece of shit with 1000000 toolbars, people threw it out and bought a new, despite the fact that a reinstall would have solved it.

[p_ing]

> You can perhaps install various weird third party things, but it does not come with it by default.

A Window Manager and Window Server don't come by default with Linux... It's always an install-time option on the major distros.

> even in the early 2000s, windows was so hilariously crappy that you had to make floppy disks to even get to install the thing.

Windows in the early 2000s installed just fine without a floppy directly from CD or PXE booting.

[OsrsNeedsf2P]

> If you took people who absolutely never tried any computing, and gave them macos, windows, and for example Plasma, they would NOT consider windows or macos to be ready for the desktop.

There's some truth to this. I've been installing fresh Windows 11s on family computers this holiday season, and good lord is it difficult to use.

The number of tweaks I had to configure to prevent actively hostile programs from ravaging disk read/writes (HDD pain), freezing and crashing, or invasive popups was absurd.

[figmert]

As someone who came from Windows, and has used Linux as my primary OS for 15 years, and MacOS here and there (cos work provided laptop), I can tell you that Linux was not ready for prime time 15 years ago. Today, I feel it is, but definitely not 15 years ago.

[7bit]

15 years back people were given Windows macOS and Linux and people voted which OS were ready for the Desktop and which were not. The only BS is your inflammatory contribution to this topic.

[someguyiguess]

I can’t tell if this is satire.