Hacker News Reader

Comment by robert_foss | Hacker News Reader

Wayland is just a protocol. The desktop environment or application is likely your actual problem.

Yes, I was a bit imprecise. It is Gnome's Wayland support that is too unstable. Given the thread topic, I didn't think to be explicit :)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Wayland, the protocol, doesn't support restarting and reconnecting to running apps. That means any little bug and you lose your entire session. X11 does support this, even Windows supports it (win+ctrl+shift+b). I wish wayland had a way to make things robust in the face of bugs, because bugs are inevitable.

Yes a protocol that has no standardized way to share screen content. And as such it is completely usless for todays workflow which is dominated by video call meetings.

Then how come I use both teams and zoom just fine under wayland?

Pipewire support is there for a long time now.

> long time

Considering the age of Wayland it's not that long. Besides that, Pipewire is not part of the Wayland protocol. This means external protocols now have to jump in fixing the deficiencies of Wayland.

No, it means that a problem best solved elsewhere is solved.. elsewhere. Screen sharing is streaming, where audio is also relevant and the two have to be synced. It would be plain incorrect to solve the two thing separately.

The composited image of the desktop is only available to the compositor. Hence it needs to be solved at the compositor. Since Wayland is essentially nothing more than a multiprocess negotiation protocol for video memory access it is exactly the right place where it should be solved.

But at the end pipewire does get the output from the compositor, doesn’t it? Not specifying a general API can be a good and a bad thing — see eg. the linux kernel’s stance on driver interfaces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com