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Comment by ntietz | Hacker News Reader

I’m in one of the “other smaller groups not included here”: people who rely on accessibility tooling that isn’t supported by Wayland. My options are:

- keep using X and stay healthy

- switch to Wayland and get strong nerve pain again

- switch to Windows or Mac

If Wayland were my only option, I would have to leave Linux for my health. So the technical merits of Wayland truly don’t matter.

Accessibility is an oft forgotten requirement and it’s something that can affect all of us at one time or another. We ought not ignore it.

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Wayland kind of reminds me of the CORBA->DBus rewrite. GNOME 2 was awesomely accessible. Then came the "qwe need to switch to DBus" people, and basically destroyed the hard work of many years. For me, GNOME Accessibility never recovered from that blow. And then came Wayland, which made things even worse.

Tech's Gen Y seemed to have a big 'NIH' thing about things that predated them, and it seems to have continued with Gen Z. Resulting in a lot of things just being trashed for the sake of it 'not being modern enough'.

Would you please talk more about this?

* What is your condition exactly?

* What were you using on X that made you healthy?

* How is it broken on Wayland?

Various nerve stuff in my arms, limiting my use of keyboards. With an ergonomic keyboard I can get through most days, but I’m having more flare ups lately so I’m doing more voice coding.

I use Talon. It simply doesn’t support Wayland, and I believe its maintainer who says that there are issues with Wayland which make support infeasible. Using it on X makes my nerve pain much less.

> and I believe its maintainer who says that there are issues with Wayland which make support infeasible.

* Where did they say that?

* What are the issues?

I am trying to narrow down exactly what the issues are. Too much of the conversation is 'something' is broken in Wayland because of 'something'.

https://artemis.sh/2022/09/18/wayland-from-an-x-apologist.ht...

talks about it at length.

It seems the main things missing for Talon are:

- input emulation, doable via uinput but not great - standard way to query the list of windows and active focus - for dwell-click support, you need to be able to know if the user is moving their mouse or clicking so you can cancel your autoclick

> What were you using on X that made you healthy?

Well my WM for a start. It did not migrate to Wayland.

And I also need to share screen from time to time (teams, Google chat, etc), which results in a dark screen for viewers in Wayland.

I despise Teams but when I was forced to use it for work and screensharing didn't work, I had to flee back to X.

Any updates from Microsoft on this issue?

Zoom is currently the same - the client finally runs in Wayland, but you can't screenshare. So it's X for now...

The "update" is that the Teams Desktop Application for Linux was discontinued last year, and the only supported way to use Teams on Linux is now to open https://teams.microsoft.com in Google Chrome or Chromium (audio/video calls don't work on Firefox).

Since Chrome/Chromium supports screen sharing with Wayland, it simply just works for me nowy while it never worked with the Elecrton-based desktop application.

Oh, this I never knew. Thank you.

I could not get Teams to even install on Xorg. At the time, screen sharing did not work in the browser.

Thankfully, my employer uses Google Meet for most of the meetings.

Screen sharing in Wayland is possible by capturing your window/desktop with OBS and streaming it to a virtual webcam that it can create for you. It's a minor hassle, but comes with the added benefit of filtering for your webcam. I use it to remove and replace my webcam background with a plugin, and it works for me in apps that don't have that as a feature.

* What is your WM?

* Have they posted what is blocking them? Besides a lack of hands on keyboards?

I am trying to narrow down exactly what the issues are. Too much of the conversation is 'something' is broken in Wayland because of 'something'.

My WM is i3. I know sway exists, but last time I tried it was sufficiently different from i3 to be annoying.

I think overall the problem with Wayland is that there is no user facing improvement over X that I know of.

I have no doubt it's more modern, better engineered, or whatelse. But in the end, the days of fiddling endlessly with your xorg.conf are over, and X _just works_ out of the box on any distro / device.

All Wayland bring me is a switch of WM, and some bugs when screensharing, for no visible benefit.

The only hope of value add I can see with Wayland would be per-monitor DPI. But last I checked, it was hackish at best.

If you can believe people on Reddit, multi monitor support on Nvidia GPUs is broken. I only run AMD so I don’t have that issue. A game mod I use for ET Legacy only runs under X.

I can see how this would be utterly limiting.

But even trackpad support is kind of messy at the moment; gestures work but pointer speed just seems weirdly different no matter what.

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