xdg-desktop-portal VS wayland-explorer

>Not losing all the work every time your windows manager crashes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509703

>remapping keys

>Use xinput to change parameters of their input devices (libinput dropped most configuration options present with evdev)

Up to the compositor.

>Global shortcuts

Also up to the compositor. Was added to xdp in https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/data... so it's up to the compositor's xdp impl to provide it. It was created by a KDE dev so I assume KDE implements it at least.

>tunnelling over ssh

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

> - O proper screen recording support

Works just fine. I use OBS.

> - broken screen sharing

Never had any trouble with it.

> - No proper global keyboard shortcut

> - No push to talk support

On its way: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/711 / https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.free...

> - Several problems with multiple screens

Haven't had any more than on X11, but then again I do use Nvidia hardware on Linux.

It might help, but at this point Linux containers can't really stabilize the whole environment, especially for games. Particular pain points include accelerated graphics (which theoretically can have a stable kernel interface, but in practice is so complex and performance-sensitive that it's not stable enough to be a "reference platform", so to speak) and modern game controllers (which present a whole mess of concerns typically "addressed" in Flatpak by granting the device=all permission and hoping for the best [1]).

I also know a guy who ran into issues with a kernel update breaking a custom allocator, although I don't know the fine details. That wasn't for a game, but games also use custom allocators for various reasons.

[1] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/536

I don't use Wayland, but it seems xdg-desktop-portal since 1.16.0 has a 'Global Shortcuts portal'. Perhaps check it out.

https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal

It's being discussed: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/611

The first bug report was filed in early 2022 but unfortunately no progress yet on the matter, even after numerous similar reports ever since.

Yeah been having the same issue since I changed to using the unstable branch, supposedly noticed and fixed upstream for a few variants of the problem (different people with different configurations of DE and xdg-* deps installed report the same issue due to timeouts of the other portals)

Wayland is good until you hit the corner cases that they decided to abandon, without leaving any alternatives. We can always have extra protocol that can be optionally enabled, but good luck with standardizing that. It feels as if Wayland people are abusing their committee to keep Wayland as-is, instead of extending it. The protocol dashboard[1] doesn't look exactly good.

[1]: https://wayland.app/protocols/

Wayland is itself an IPC system (that uses UNIX domain sockets). I would make a custom Wayland protocol (if there isn't already an appropriate one available, look here: https://wayland.app/protocols/). You can define the protocol in XML and generate the boilerplate code in C using wayland-scanner. I assume smithay also has an equivalent of wayland-scanner.

https://wayland.app/protocols/ and https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ are just API references.

Given I will be using most of the Wayland protocol to achieve anything (it's minimal) and Wayland is well specified then the 'start at the bottom and build up' design pattern fits. Wayland has a wire protocol based on a Unix socket, and usefully Java has supported Unix sockets since release 16, so I can write everything in Java to (de)serialise messages. This gets me going quickly, providing positive feedback that I'm on the right track..

The core is bare-bones, there are numerous standard protocols since, and many other are in standardization. Here is a site to review their state: https://wayland.app/protocols/

There is some lock-in in some places where tools adopt a protocol that is only implemented by wlroots compositors, or only implemented by KDE, etc, but I suspect this will improve over time as protocols stabilise ( and you can browse the available protocols here: https://wayland.app/protocols/ )

This link comes up in literally every Wayland thread and it is even more bullshit now than it was in 2013 when it was first posted (and it was bullshit then too). It is titled "the real story" but it is quite the opposite.

A few key points:

1) he laughs at how X has a bunch of extensions. https://wayland.app/protocols/ hypocrites much. In 2013, since it was completely unusable, it probably didn't have many. But turns out real world use leads to "useless" features being reimplemented.

2) he complains about how X.org has broad hardware compatibility. As if that's a bad thing. Meanwhile wayland, even now it still doesn't work reliably on half the graphics chips on the market.

3) It complains that certain X features are not fully network transparent. True, but most are and you can detect at runtime and gracefully degrade. Wayland "fixes" this by just dropping the whole feature.

4) it flat-out lies saying the X server does nothing yet it is so much hard to maintain code. The core X protocol provides backward compatibility and is rock solid (and really easy to impelment from scratch btw, someone did it in Javascript for a tutorial for crying out loud). Meanwhile the Wayland compositor keeps accumulating everything because of point 1. Need a screenshot? Add it it the compositor. Need a hotkey? Add it to the compositor. Need drag and drop? Add it to the compositor. Need a notification icon? Add it to the compositor. In X, all those are peer to peer. Graphics are actually a relatively small part of a graphical user interface, something Wayland is still slow to learn.

5) He complains that certain applications are written inefficiently with blocking calls which is inefficient over a network connection. Wayland's calls are ALL blocking and just has no network connection.

6) Complains that X may draw things unnecessarily. Indeed... but there's an extension to disable that. Easy fix. Wayland even uses the same drivers!

So that brings me to Wayland Protocols!. In X11 land, X11 defines a lot of behaviors for you. There is no such definition in Wayland-land by design - this is to give compositors a lot more freedom and flexibility in how they function. It also means that it required time for protocols to develop to cover all of the things that we would need in a desktop window compositor to bring it up to snuff for desktop usage. These protocols evolved through the past 4-5 years of everybody seeing it's shortcomings on a Desktop system compared to a mobile phone based UI. With the latest fractional scaling protocol we have more or less finally "closed the gap" between Wayland and Xorg on the desktop - it's just a matter of compositors implementing full support for all of the protocols people want.