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Funny that you say "gnome only", cuz currently there are "non-gnome only" apps due to a specific protocol not being implemented by gnome (drm-leasing for VR, at least on main. there is a PR that is specifically said to not merge since they want to handle it via a xdg-portal). They are very wary of exposing anything in an way that could very much backfire in the long run, be it as a general implementation or exposing something they would be stuck with.

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The xdg-portal attempt was misguided and I don't beleive anyone is pursuing it at this point. Ideally drm-leasing would be managed by the login manager, allowing multiple compositors to lease connectors and run independently on other monitors, as well as being used for VR headsets. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/29078.

Sidenote: I hacked the wayland protocol implementation for gnome into working at least for SteamVR, but at least with AMD gpus there is some serious bug preventing the card from performing properly. It basically throttles itself for no reason and never hits the refresh rates needed for smooth VR, especially since there is no asynchronous reprojection at the moment. So while ideally the drm-leasing problem would be solved already there are other even more important problems to solve with linux VR for now.

I’m not blaming gnome, I just see it as a big problem in the future ‘oh sorry just have to restart wayland so I can boot into $app’. Any display renderer that has this limitation and expects each individual project to cross-support other renderers is a poor design, at least in my books.

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