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Comment by mattrick | Hacker News Reader

It definitely depends on your definition of "ready". Wayland is completely usable for most hardware configurations I've thrown at it, but ymmv. It's pretty much been indistinguishable from X11 for me.

There's still a lack of certain protocols for things that were possible in X11. The one that's bugged me the most is one that would allow authorized applications to track which window is active so tools can swap around hotkeys and macros and stuff. That was super easy to do in X11 but Wayland doesn't yet have a way of doing this afaik.

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There's lots of little things I think. Like I have my trackball scroll by holding down middle click and moving the ball. Not too hard to do in X11, works in all window managers too. I have no idea how to do it Wayland, it seems like it's a different process for every compositor/DE. I think maybe I could do it in GNOME but then I'd have to use GNOME.

So far the only positive thing I've noticed about Wayland is that it plays better with my pen tablet but that's also extremely frustrating because why is better pen support linked to the compositor/window manager in the first place. Everything else is either the same or worse.

That's how thinkpad trackpoint works, right? Hold the middle button and you can scroll horizontally and vertically using the trackpoint. It works on gnome/wayland, so maybe there is a way to configure generic trackball to behave like that too.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/TrackPoint

Just a guess but probably its due to libinput, which is used by default on Wayland. AFAIK it can also be set on X as the default for probably similarly good pen support, but I have never tried - I am more than fine with Wayland.

That isn't a Wayland-level feature, but individual compositors may support it. For example that can be done in sway with `swaymsg -t subscribe -m '["window"]' | ...`

That's one of my biggest problems with Wayland; I rather like being able to swap out the window manager without breaking half my tools.

Since it’s wlroots, most niche window manager will also understand it. There is basically only gnome, plasma, and all the rest.

That's probably true for protocol-level things but still doesn't cover as much as you'd think. For example, with X (possibly just Xorg but at least everyone standardized on that) I could run `setxkbmap` to set keyboard layout. Now as far as I can tell, wlroots does have a proper way to control keyboard layout... but it's up to each and every compositor to hook it up. So naturally, when I went to try a cool new compositor I found, I discovered that it doesn't actually support that. In fact, I couldn't find a way to configure keyboard layout at all in that compositor (don't recall which, but it was wlroots-based). So I threw up my hands and went back to X11, where one command controls the keyboard on literally every window manager I have ever tried.

No, `swaymsg` is specific to sway, not wlroots. It won't work with any other compositor (wlroots-based or not) unless that compositor also binds $SWAYSOCK and serves the i3-ipc protocol.

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