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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I used KDE for my forays into Wayland.

    Bear in mind that each desktop environment has its own implementation of Wayland, meaning each can offer vastly different user experiences

    Funny you mention that, as that’s (at least closely related to) one of the things I was alluding to when I mentioned design deficiencies in Wayland. The way I understand it is each individual Wayland compositor is free to create their own protocol for stuff like screenshots, and then the Wayland team will take the parts of those protocols and then combine them into the Wayland protocol for e.g. screenshots, which compositors then go back and replace their protocol with that one. Which sounds great on paper, but it leads to a problem I’ll call Ecosystem Lock-in, I don’t quite like that term, I don’t think its fully accurate, but it’s all I can think of for now. What happens is in order for a screenshot program to work on a given compositor they have to interface with that compositor’s screenshot protocol, and it’s a lot of work to support every compositor under the sun, so most devs just won’t. (Which is fine, great even, I think devs these days try to support too much stuff). But say you don’t like Spectacle (Spektacle? I don’t remember), your options are limited to whatever supports KDE’s screenshot protocol.

    Or say you’re just moving from an X11 based DE and giving Wayland a try. In the process of moving over you discover your nifty little scrot based screenshot script no longer works. After some research you discover that scrot is X11 only, and the Wayland equivalent is grim, so you get your scripts converted over but they still don’t work. More research later you learn that grim doesn’t support KDE’s screenshot protocol, and Wayland compositors basically get to do whatever they want in terms of protocol design/implementation. This is what happened to me, and caused me to give up on Wayland.