Comment by hyperion2010 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyperion2010 | Hacker News Reader

Wayland was designed to solve a very specific set of use cases and nothing more. The number of times I have read "wayland doesn't do that" or "that's not wayland's job" or "wayland is just the compositor" are telling. Of course a stack that is compositor + windowing toolkits is going to miss countless mission critical use cases in countless workflows, not to mention that it is an even further regression from composability in the window manager space and no, dbus is not the answer either, you can't make literally every program depend on dbus just to be able to do simple things like take a screenshot, or automatically rearrange windows. Every program having to use a toolkit or implement a message passing system themselves will never happen because few developers have the expertise needed to do so. This is in part why things like X11 were created in the first place, so that there could be separation of concerns. Wayland stomps all over that and thus doesn't even offer something that could become a defacto standard, so it seems that X11 will continue to live on.

Right, X11 made it possible to have literally hundreds of window managers written to fit all possible tastes.

With Wayland, the ecosystem of window managers will never be as rich, because a window manager has to implement too many things to be usable.

You can always take a compositor and fork it to implement your window management features…

or, much better, use a compositor with a plugin system, so window managers can become plugins! :)

https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire

> Right, X11 made it possible to have literally hundreds of window managers written to fit all possible tastes.

I've used it since its inception, however it has always kind of sucked.

I think it goes to it's basic philosophy: it did not enforce policy.

This let it survive a long time. It was whatever people wanted it to be. But because of this flexibility, it never became great.

It's like the old Lilly Tomlin skit - "I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific."

What has become great? E.g. has NeXT / macOS graphics system become great? (Yes, I dislike macOS for its lack of customizability and being opinionated. It may be great for someone, but not for me.)

For toolkit consistency I think macos is one of the best. consistency = 1/customizability and I agree with you there, especially annoying for folks who know their way around a computer. For 3d acceleration windows seems to have the most advanced and high performance graphics that is in wide use.

consistency * customizability = 1

What are your use-cases not addressed by Wayland?

The sway compositor has been standardizing protocols for screenshots, screen recording/streaming, composable desktop components and so on.

Just wait until everyone else creates their own standard protocols.

Nah, those protocols are also implemented in wl-roots which is the foundation of virtually every single wayland compositor, otherwise you'd have to write 50+k of lines of code yourself.

Only if you ignore the most widely used Wayland compositors on the desktop, Mutter and Kwin. I doubt all compositors built upon wlroots come even close to the user bases of those two.

There is no way to tell current keyboard layout as of now. There is somewhat a debate on that topic because Gnome people what to have dbus api instead of wayland protocol extension for this functionality. Sway people are pushing for protocol extension and for now we have two use sway-specific api so a bar on a screen would be able to show current keyboard layout.

I use xdotool to simulate mouse/keyboard input, and keynav to move my cursor with the keyboard.

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