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> Is that why they're so unresponsive to user needs?

It's because Wayland is a set of protocols, rather than a single dominant implementation.

In order to do it right, cross-compositor and flexible, you have to get different actors with different interests and bandwidth agree on a standard. This takes time.

In order to get it working fast, developers need to make a compositor-specific implementation first and then put in the extra work of getting it through the standards discussion as well as switching their compositor ecosystem to the new standard.

Until this happens with all parts that you care about, you're going to be annoyed either about interoperability or functionality. Pick your poison, and cue Moxie's "The Ecosystem is Moving" blog post. Also, keep using X11 until Wayland has the features you want. Most DEs/WMs haven't ripped out X11 support yet, and hopefully won't until their support of Wayland protocols is solid enough.

Sounds like a terribly managed project that will never reach an acceptable state. Again, I don't know why people are so tolerant of it.

If the Linux kernel had worked the same way, we'd never have gotten Linux.

>If the Linux kernel had worked the same way, we'd never have gotten Linux.

Yes we would. In fact it's exactly how Linux works and has worked for decades. New features get added in drivers and then get rolled up into driver subsystems when enough hardware supports them.

I acknowledge that the Wayland team is not responsible for the implementation decisions of the GNOME team.

However, the Wayland team is responsible for the set of protocols that they've developed and that they've asked others to implement. The Wayland team has failed to define protocols that are flexible enough to provide basic functionality that users expect, even if they were implemented perfectly.

This should not be a process that depends on individual developers building compositor-specific remote-desktop tools first, then praying that someone likes them enough to put it in the standard. Wayland built the standard, they just built an insufficient one.

I you feel so strongly about missing features, I suggest you report the issue and propose and approaches to it. Complaining on HN that "there's functionality missing" won't change anything.

I believe that the only thing missing is capturing individual windows with screencopy. There's actually an issue for that and ongoing discussion on how to implement it. Nobody's decided it's a bad idea, it's simply a matter of nobody having done it so far.

Xorg never "implemented" this feature. It's just that any client can read what other clients are doing. So Skype can screen-scrape your password manager by default. Obviously this was not a good choice, so Wayland has dedicated protocols for this functionality, with the intent of restricting them only to privileged clients.

Finally, while no _standard_ protocol exists to address this, there are compositor specific ways of capturing a single window, so most users have their needs met.

> Xorg also doesn't prevent you from using an application that does have these functions. Wayland does prevent you.

Surely, as much as seatbelts prevent my movement. And literally every wayland compositor has this functionality, that there is not a universally supported standard here sucks, but that’s just the way of life of the bazaar. There is no one company exerting a cathedral approach over the whole thing, and I believe that is what most of the linux users prefer. It just so happens to have some tradeoffs as well.

> The necessary APIs don't exist, so it isn't possible to write the extra functionality without changing the compositor.

Except they do exist and do work.