Wayland Emulated Input Library (like xdotool) | Hacker News Reader

Wayland Emulated Input Library (like xdotool)

gitlab.freedesktop.org

6 pointsbtdmaster6 comments

Wayland was the worst turn the Linux desktop world could ever take. No accessibility²³, no compatibility with the most prevalent graphics cards (NVidia*) and no use for anyone other than maintainers¹.

Also, lots of bugs in derived works (e.g. KDE) and due to hostility of maintainers noone wants to file bugs for Wayland. Yeah I know this gets flagged, but maybe it inspires others to compete with Wayland. I'd welcome to join.

¹ https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers

² https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland

³ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25175894

The are tiny potatoes and or isn't make sense. Why yes, developers are needed to fix issues? Of course Nvidia support is shit, Nvidia are monsters & want to gatekeep all innovation & have happily not participated in any ecosystem since forever. The accessibility page looks like a bunch of validation that most of the current tools work fairly well, with a couple gnits.

What we had wasn't going to keep working. Change isn't fun. But moaning & whining & refusing to rip off the bandaid is not the path. Try to not be so distressed.

this gonna get flagged because it is an opinion that could had make sense 5 years ago, or worse

It's a bit bigger scale than xdotool. It's also intended for things like vnc & remote desktop use.

Alas, there seems to be a lot of tension between wlroots & libei on these matters. It's not super clear to me what the clash actually is over, but it's been quite tense, in my view, and wlroots maintainers seem quite dug in.

Edit: theres a bunch of related issues, but it actually resolved with more amicability than I had remembered. Some tension that libei was it's own protocol, and a question of how it would integrate with Wayland... https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libei/-/issues/2

The thing is that central abstractions are simply missing in wayland. They are totally focusing on providing basic services for compositors. But the plural ("compositors") is what's wrong, as a compositor is an essential component of a desktop environment, and a plural form shouldn't be required.

By shying away from implementing anything else than the most basic stuff (and failing at that, sorry), the Linux desktop is left worse than before wayland¹.

If I would believe in conspiracies, I'd think Microsoft would sponsor Wayland. WHich is maybe even true.

¹ Yes, scrolling is smoother.

Fragmentation but based around common protocols is in my view a huge win.

Yes it causes issues & is slower. But putting all your eggs in one monolith & figuring out governance is an impossible task. It go bad.

Having diverse ecosystems is what made Linux great. Clutching for control & singular answers is an authoritarian convenience which can expedite causes, but which is long term a huge negative.

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