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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

> On X11, skipTaskbar sends a _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR message to the X11 window manager. There is not a direct equivalent for Wayland, and the known workarounds have unacceptable tradeoffs (e.g. Window.is_skip_taskbar in GNOME requires unsafe mode), so Electron is unable to support this feature on Linux.

One Linux-specific change, and it's a design regression made only because GNOME/Wayland no longer supports the feature. Yipee!

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That's a confusing change. It doesn't work on Wayland, so let's also remove it for X11?

Another example of why the Linux Desktop alternatives of alternatives in-fighting with X11 vs Wayland has caused developers like Electron.js being unable to support both as doing that creates a regression in one. So they remove the feature all together.

> in-fighting

What in-fighting? Wayland is more or less what happened when X11 developers decided to lose the baggage of backwards compatibility (or, to be more exact, to move it towards a mostly self-contained layer of XWayland), not a break-neck competitor.

In-fighting here is characterized as the strange differences between Wayland and x11. It's perfectly fine if the Wayland developers don't want to focus on building a desktop window server, but they shouldn't position themselves as the dominant player if they're not going to make it work well for everyone. wlroots doesn't solve this in a meaningful way, and the aversion to adding meaningful features permanently positions Wayland as a worse window server than, say, Quartz.

If x11 developers don't want to build x11 anymore, fine. I have no problem with those contributors walking away. They shouldn't try to replace a passenger jet with a helicopter though, just because they "both fly" doesn't mean they achieve the same purposes or have the same design principles.

Why is it that every time something goes wrong in the Linux GUI world, GNOME is involved?

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