physlock VS wlroots

When I resume after suspending, the tty prompt for physlock comes up, as intended. When I enter my password, though, it shows the desktop and lets me move around the mouse, but the keyboard does nothing.

I'm not familiar with the PinePhone, but since you're able to use fbkeyboard in VTs, it sounds like physlock might work for you. I just wrote a comment about it in another thread. Unfortunately it's not very amenable to customization.

I use and recommend physlock. It's the most security-focused screen locking utility I'm aware of. Upon activation, it switches out of the graphical session and into tty0 which helps mitigate both of your issues. It also locks TTY switching to prevent accessing a logged-in TTY while locked, which is something that I don't think most other screen lockers do.

I use physlock[0] which locks all of the ttys. I've had no issues.

[1] https://github.com/muennich/physlock

>barrier has been unmaintained for a long time.

As if not having new features added for 2 years makes it stop working? barrier is perfectly fine on normal linux desktop installs. I actually use synergy 1.x personally which has been "unmaintained" for much, much longer. Except synergy 1.x will compile and run on anything from windows 98 to ubuntu 5 to debian 12. You can't get a waynergy or inputleap to compile on an OS more than 2 years old. And even then, as you say, it's crapshoot if the particular wayland will have libei; many like sway are actively hostile to it and never will: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/issues/2378

It looks like they actually patched it to filter those modes out, so presumably it worked out of the box and was considered undesirable: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/issues/3038

I haven't experienced any of those. The video game performance hit may be due to vsync, but I don't play games so I haven't noticed.

You can however use tinywl. It is an example Wayland compositor that can't do more than displaying one application.

Sway/wlroots has implemented this, but I can't find any discussion for KDE.

wlroots is archived on github. Is it abandoned? Just saying, that only means they moved git hosts :-D

A lot of compositors are based no the wlroots lirbary. So they are still sharing the development effort and have a common base, its just in the form of a library rather than a display server.

gamescope use wlroots