Hacker News Reader

Comment by reppap | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand what is supposedly missing in Wayland for productivity users? At work I have been using gnome with the wayland backend for years at this point and I can't really figure out anything that's missing.

View on HN

Accessibility is apparently a big problem with wayland. E.g., the most popular / ?only? app that supports hardware eye trackers on Linux does not work with wayland, and states that it likely never will as wayland does not provide what it needs to add support (it is also the most popular app for voice/noise control). Even basic things like screen readers are apparently still an issue with wayland. Without a strong accessibility story, systems running wayland would have been banned at my last employer (a college).

Personally, I have a 3200x2400 e-ink monitor that has a bezel that covers the outer few columns of pixels. I use a custom modeline to exclude those columns from use. And, a fractional scaling of .603x.5 on this now 3184x2400 monitor to get 1920x1200 effective resolution. Zero idea how to accomplish this with wayland-- I do not think it is possible, but if anyone knows a way, I am all ears.

I ran into, at least, ten issues without solutions/work-arounds (like the issue with my monitor) when I tried to switch this year, after getting a new laptop. Reverted to a functional, and productively familiar, setup with X.

I don't know about other DE, but at least with Plasma there is a "overscan" option to compensate for hidden borders.

Thanks for that.

Overscan is not supported in wlroots yet. Seems the issue is that handling overscan is display driver specific.

But, now I know the keyword to look for.

The xdg-desktop-portal stuff is still too immature. For example, my friend wanted my help after upgrading his Pop_OS to 24.04, and 24.04 replaced GNOME with COSMIC. COSMI had no RemoteDesktop portal (and still doesn't have it), so we couldn't use RustDesk like we always did without him installing a GNOME session just for that.

I've been an i3 user for almost two decades, but eventually switched to Sway - to this day there's no InputCapture portal, so I can't use Synergy with Sway, forcing me to switch to i3 while I'm working.

It's been over 10 years of things like that. There's always SOMETHING missing.

Screenshots are just completely broken. People always tell me to use other apps like flameshot but IME it just doesn't work and I don't want to have to mess around so much to take screenshots.

I'm still using Wayland because it's what came with my distro (endeavour OS, gnome), but it's really strange how it came broken out of the box.

I'm curious what OS you are running that has broken screen shots on wayland because that hasn't been my experience on Fedora.

It's right there in my comment

Yeah, my bad sorry.

Headless remote desktop, at least for KDE, is very much not possible today as far as I can tell. It's the last thing I miss from Xorg.

FWIW, like everything else in Wayland, it's per-compositor. Here's a working headless sway in a container:

https://gitlab.com/yjftsjthsd-g/docker_sway-vnc

(This is not a defense of Wayland, just trying to share useful information)

Hmm, you mention in the README that it only works in a privileged container. This of course negates the security benefits Wayland supposedly has over X11, so it doesn't seem ideal.

It really doesn't. The security benefits of Wayland are about isolating applications from each other, which this still has.

Also that's only really relevant to this running in a container. My point was that you can have headless Wayland.

>what is supposedly missing in Wayland

My desktop is a bit long in the tooth (22.04), but I've long given up on trying to screen shot or screen share from Wayland. I have my Macbook sitting next to it and use it for those things, where it works basically flawlessly.

Kind of waiting for 26.04 to upgrade at this point, but I'm not really expecting any of this to be better yet.

edit: If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have gone Wayland at 22.04.

I'm running fedora and have been screenshoting and screen sharing (with the teams PWA) just fine. So might be time to get something newer.

I am on KDE never had any problems taking screenshots.

What keeps you from going to Ubuntu 24.04? I have been screen sharing and screen shotting on Wayland (Gnome and KDE) without problem.

Autoclickers and screen macros on Wayland are all janky

Reply on news.ycombinator.com