Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

This is very good. Not only because it illustrates the maturity of wayland, this is been done using pipewire. The last remaining pieces of the puzzle are finally being placed. A modern linux distro will give you on the desktop a good oomd, good video drivers, pipewire, wayland, GTK 4, GNOME 40, a modern kernel, compiler, dev-tools... and modern cross distro software through flatpak/snap/appimage. There are still things to improve and fix, but the desktop has never been so promising.

The sad thing: I've been hearing/saying basically this for decades.

View on HN

Well, there is another reason for optimism: Wayland is supported in ChromeOS and WSL2, and it seems to be the base for any modern integration with other operational systems (macOS ARM maybe?).

> The sad thing: I've been hearing/saying basically this for decades.

I don't think Linux distros will ever be popular compared to the commercial OSes, since for one thing to be popular nowadays you need to invest money in many things like branding and marketing so something is mainstream.

But looking in another way, in the past I would say that desktop Linux was dying, and nowadays it is more live than ever, so this is something.

Actually I deeply envy windows users. They can enter a computer store and basically choose any hardware with the certainty that it will very likely work on their computer; then can sign any on-line service with the same certainty, they can use almost any recently released professional software with the same certainty...

Linux on the desktop is MUCH better now, it is improving but still no there yet. And I've been saying this very same phrase for decades now.

I don't care about a significant fraction of the desktop, but I'd love to enter a computer store and choose a hardware without severely limiting my choices.

> I've been hearing/saying basically this for decades.

After almost 13 years of development Wayland gains a (de-facto not even standardized) way to something as simple as taking screenshots / streaming. This is not "very good".

Considering the alternative is not having the feature... I'd say this is very good.

Of course, we have to consider that wayland is basically a re-thought for a substitute of a system that exists and evolves since early 80's... It is acceptable that it takes long. If such wait is needed to get something better than what we had and fix antique design limitations, I have no problem waiting for it.

First of all, this is a standardized way (it is standardized in the XDG desktop portal APIs, which are implemented for example by Plasma and Gnome, and for wlroots-based compositors).

It was also never within the scope of Wayland to provide these kinds of APIs (previously when screen capture was available through the X11 interface, that was more of an accident than an intended feature, and it was an intentional design choice not to repeat this mistake in the design of Wayland).

Instead, compositors and applications (that use the Wayland protocol to communicate) were supposed to agree on a standard interface to do these kinds of things and then use that interface. And that's in fact what they did, by implementing the XDG desktop portal system (that's entirely separate from Wayland). I also see evidence of this interface existing as far back as 2016, although I didn't go digging for when it was initially invented.

Notice that this article doesn't say "is it now possible to screen capture when using Wayland", it only says that OBS Studio now uses this standard interface for screen capturing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com