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Comment by Daunk | Hacker News Reader

I'm not against Wayland, but I think Wayland is currently not good for the Linux ecosystem. I've had lots of friends try Linux, and they've had issues with Discord global keyboard shortcuts not working, and window positions not restoring at application start, and lots of other small issues, which add up in the end. But once they switched to X11, they've all been very happy.

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Yup. I fully understand that X11 is a shitshow under the hood, but it works and Wayland frequently does not work. Screen recording, window positions, various multi-monitor and calibration issues, ...

On my laptop I use to write blog posts, that never ever gets plugged into a second screen? Sure, Wayland's great. On a computer that I expect normal people to be able to use without dumb problems? Hell no!

Comparing X11 and Wayland isn’t even correct because for a functional desktop you need Xwayland anyway. X11 never went away, we piled more code on top and now we have an eternal transitionary period and two ways of doing things.

I think Wayland is good for more technical users. Going from i3 to sway or bspwm to river feels like essentially nothing has changed. On the other hand, Gnome X11 to Wayland might be a bigger shock.

Unfortunately, Wayland inherently can't be like Pipewire, which instantly solved basically 90% of audio issues on Linux through its compatibility with Pulseaudio, while having (in my experience) zero drawbacks. If someone could make the equivalent of Pipewire for X11, that'd be nice. Probably far-fetched though.

It can absolutely be like that. Global keyboard shortcuts not working is a deliberate design choice in Wayland (as is non-foreground apps not having access to the clipboard).

Gnome is bringing global shortcuts AFAIK in the next stable version

Yeah but now everything's platform-specific. We'll have a KDE version, a Gnome version, a wlroots version, ...

I bet dollars-to-donuts it won't work with X11 apps

There's no reason it couldn't.

Yes there is; Xwayland won't support it.

So what? Xwayland doesn't support file selectors, but XDG has a portal that handles it fine.

I can’t speak to the GNOME side of things, but I’ve been enjoying global shortcuts on KDE Wayland for years now. No issues to report whatsoever.

"window positions not restoring at application start"

Well you see, you are actually just silly for wanting this or asking for this, because it's actually just a security flaw...or something. I will not elaborate further.

Spot on.

--geometry is an exploit that will end in your financial ruin. Spend your weekend figuring out which tiling manager and dbus commands will come close to approximating a replacement before giving up and realizing you can manually move windows for the rest of your life. Two plus two is five.

Thats not true. You are mistaking allowing the application itself to set window position, which obviously is a security flaw.

Is it sarcasm?

Which desktop environment do your friends use?

They started with Hyprland, GNOME or KDE Plasma. Most of them have ended up using Cinnamon, and the rest use XFCE.

hyprland is a fun spectacle, but takes insane effort to make remotely livable. Also any apparent shortcut (dotfiles) will do nasty damage to your install. Anyone hypr-curious should sandbox in an install they don't mind wiping.

I’m really curious about your experience, what distro you used hyprland on, what dotfiles did damage to your install etc.

I just installed hyprland yesterday and outside of having to switch back to i3 once to install what they had set for a terminal in their default config(kitty), I haven’t had to leave again.

What does hyprland offer over i3?

From my experience, nice decorations. I haven't gone further than getting a top bar set up and getting my normal shortcuts setup.

I'm sure I'm not getting everything everything I could out of it.

Asahi and hyde. "Nasty damage" isn't irreparable, but it would be significant effort to enumerate every small touch that affects defaults from other DEs and restore them. There is no "restore all touched configs to default" afaik. Since my asahi install was a lightly used toy anyway I just reinstalled. My next attempt will be with a VM that I make image backups of.

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