And it's worse than this because there is no wayland. Without a strong reference implementation and with the very minimal wayland core protocol, each desktop environment picks and chooses and implements their own incompatible extensions for what should be wayland core features. This means you don't develop for linux, or even linux wayland. You develop for linux wayland mutter. Or linux wayland plasma. Or linux wayland hyprland. Because those three waylands are going to be doing things which you need every day on an average desktop in their own incompatible ways: https://wayland.app/protocols/
Developers have to decide which DE they'll have their applications run in rather than having your application be able to function across all linux desktops. This is different than how it was the last 20 years. No matter what else you say, this is a change from how it was. It's massive fragmentation of the userspace.
Literally the only wayland DE that supports screen readers right now is GNOME's mutter and that's mostly just for GNOME's software because of course they invented something new to work around the problems of the wayland architecture.
You could make this same post and replace any component with Wayland. At the end of the day the Linux community will continuously set the Linux Desktop back by N years. The most obvious case of this is Linus Tech Tips trying Linux to replace Windows for gaming, getting lost in what distro to pick, and then being flamed online for choosing the "wrong" distro. It's impossible for anyone without the time and curiosity to choose a Linux distro, and then to stick with it. My only "hope" for the year of The Linux Desktop is SteamOS, since that will have a commercial force driving adoption and removing the need for consumers to make a choice entirely.
people may remember 'Y' from many years ago, AFAIK it was suppose to replace X, but never got to the point were Wayland is now.
>The original conceit behind Wayland is to only implement what is needed for a simple Linux desktop
And this is my biggest issue with Wayland. If it started out with portability in mind maybe I would give it a try. But I am sticking with X because it is fully usable on the BSDs.
Data point: On my current and previous work laptops (iGPU ThinkPads) I switched from the default Wayland back to X11 because of various bugs (hangs, stutters, resume failures), in X11 they don't happen, seems to work flawlessly.
Sometimes it's worse to live in a mess that is being constantly fixed I guess.
That really isn't his gripe. In fact near the end he describes would have been a good direction for starting fresh.
His pain is that it's been 17 years and some basic core functionality is either still broken or entirely missing. It's not my expertise so I don't know if it could have been planned any better, but 17 years and _basics_ still being broken doesn't sound great.
FWIW I recently switched full time to Linux and have had absolutely 0 problems with GNOME, Wayland and Fedora, though I am using an AMD GPU.
wl-copy works fine, askpass works, copy and paste works, screen sharing with Google Meet works, drag and drop works. Using an iphone as a webcam works as does recording my screen.
Most importantly using multiple monitors with fractional scaling works perfectly. AFIAK this is not possible to do well (at all?) on X11, which is a complete show stopper for me.
If anyone's reading this and sitting on the fence, I would really give Fedora a go. I've found it so much more polished than Ubuntu, and loads of things which didn't work on it work out of the box on Fedora (at least compared to 24.04 LTS).
I am on latest Fedora Gnome, and tab switching between windows randomly stucks. It's so annoying, i had to go back to X11, even if handles badly high dpi laptop; the alternative being to reboot randomoy in the middle of the work
It's pretty funny to see "copy/paste works" and "drag and drop works" presented like some kind of win. That's the absolute baseline for a desktop OS.. since at least Windows 3.x.
Windows, bloated and ad-riddled as it is now, never had to be defended on the basis that basic GUI behavior still functioned.
But this year surely will be the year of the Linux desktop!
Wayland was designed exclusively i3 style compositors and has been stuck there ever since not a “simple desktop”. It is incredibly pathetic that you can’t even open a window in that same place you closed it on Wayland. No one involved seems interested in solving any of the usage problems and if you look at various threads it’s finger pointing at other software.
The rule should be if Wayland isn’t going to supply a timely answer, software developers should target an implementation of whatever missing feature as implemented in X11. That is the only way to move forward if the threat of X11 coming back exists.
> Wayland was designed exclusively i3 style compositors
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool i3 (now sway) user. I don't even use floating windows. Wayland has still been an awful experience, broke a bunch of workflows for me
I'm still of the opinion that the right direction is something architectEd more like NeWS with better underlying language support. If you're going to break stuff make it a real improvement.
I switched to wayland mainly because screen lock on X11 is not possible to do securely. If some way is found to crash the big screen lock window in X11, the attacker gets access.
Again, we may live in a parallel universe. Because I am using KDE and wayland and NVIDIA, and it works beautifully. Although NVIDIA really started to work great only fairly recently (last couple of years).
And using X is a noticeably worse experience.
I'am excited to follow the still very early development of xfwl to see how a classic DE works in wayland.
I have been thoroughly enjoying Wayland with Niri. It is snappy, looks beautiful on my 4K monitor, and handles X11 emulation perfectly (via xwayland-satellite). I have not seen any major issues with OBS, clipboard handling, or any application I have had to run.
So as an end user, I don’t get all the hubbub. Reminds me a bit of the whole systemd craze from some time ago.
Disclaimer: I don't have any skin in this game, I was fine with X11 and I am fine with Wayland, and I actually think it's nice to have both (and more, like Xlibre I think?).
I understand complaints about systemd, I don't understand the complaints about Wayland. This whole article sounds like a big rant and doesn't seem to bring much information.
> I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language.
Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".
> In fact, you can find examples showing roughly a 40% slowdown when using Wayland over X11! I'm sure there are similar benchmarks claiming Wayland wins and vice versa (happy to link them as well if provided).
"I am gonna make a bad argument and follow it by saying that you could make the same bad argument to say the opposite". Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at performance.
> Anecdotal experience is not enough to say this is a broad issue, but my point is that when an average user encounters graphical issues within 60 seconds of using it, maybe it's not ready to be made the default!
So the whole article is built around ranting while saying "I don't have anything meaningful to say, I'll just share an anecdote and directly say it's not worth much because it's an anecdote"?
> But the second actual users are forced to use it expect them to be frustrated!
Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.
I've used linux desktop environments using Wayland and others using x11. No real problems with either.
Let's instead get excited by all the new linux users coming in thanks to SteamOS and Valve. If the trend continues, we might start seeing larger software companies releasing native linux versions of their software -- and then, the year of the linux desktop will start becoming an actual possibility!
(I heard affinity suite is linux friendly now btw, and davinci resolve too -- not sure if proton is necessary or not, but either way, really cool)
> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.
Recent versions of gnome session are compiled only with wayland support in archlinux. To change DE or distribution or use custom package is quite a stretch to call it's not forced.
> > I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language.
> Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".
I think the argument is not that X11 defeats it all - but that for 99.9999% of users its security theater when deployed in the real world. Most commonly, as long as processes can read each other's memory/configuration/etc.
I'm sure there is a use-case for untrusted sharing of Wayland enabled GPU rendering or something - though AFAIK none of the enterprise remote desktop use it, and they have the resources to implement it themselves anyway.
I've been running Wayland for two years now. I still hit weird bugs with desktop sharing / obs tinkering; It's just not a critical use for me.
So it's fair to question the design wisdom of adding the complexity and UX pain points if it seems to be worth so little.
But maybe i'm overlooking some large group of people dependent on Wayland security boundaries?
The main problem of Wayland is fragmentation, technical problems could be solved by throwing work at it, but not as long as Wayland is "just a protocol". Designing it as a protocol (and with optional extensions on top!), instead of a traditional centralized implementation was a pretty stupid decision (and not just in hindsight).
Instead of bundling forces to improve a single implementation like it was the case with X11, now everybody and their mother writes their own incomplete implementation of the Wayland protocol, and badly. I don't understand how anybody thinks that this mess is a good thing. At least for X11 on Linux there was a single implementation that contributors could focus on, now the bugs are spread over dozens of projects. If I'd like to sabotage the entire desktop-Linux idea, this is exactly how I would do it ;(
Anyone who wants to continue using a modern, actively-developed desktop environment. GNOME has dropped X11; KDE has announced the transition. I would consider being told "use Wayland, or find a different desktop environment" being forced, even though nobody has actually put a gun to my head.
I have managed to make Wayland work for me, but only by patching away the hardcoded gestures. I also developed a means to start and stop XScreenSaver, although that is thankfully now obsolete thanks to some work by JWZ. Just yesterday I still had issues with an entire window of text gibbering up and down in VSCode at a certain scaling level (used to have that in Firefox, as well, but it was evidently fixed).
To put a positive conspiratorial spin on the recent Wayland push: maybe they think that taking away the option to fall back to X11 will finally get enough eyes on Wayland to fix its remaining issues.
Paint me crazy but for last ~10 years I'm having this weird feeling that FOSS embraces corporate-style of management, development for projects too much. The ethos of having a choices is slowly and steadily being replaced by "comply, adapt or begone" tactic. And if you try to voice your opinion or heavens forbid - criticize, you are committing a crime against the coding humanity.
The changes are being done by small steps and I'd say this removal of fallback to X11 option counts as such.
> I don't understand the complaints about Wayland.
The last time a distro tried to sell me on it, it left me unable to drag/drop browser tabs to reorder them (a fundamental part of my daily workflow). Thankfully, Mint still has the option to use X11 so reverting was trivial. That won't always be the case because...
> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.
Which, like avoiding systemd, is becoming increasingly difficult as distributions prematurely switch. Like when some Linux distros made KDE4 the default (~20 years ago) before most graphics cards could actually handle KDE4's requirements. Switching distros after years, even decades, of use is not as trivial as distro-hoppers who swap out their distro every three weeks might like to think. Lots of know-how and muscle memory gets lost in the transition, both of which have to be rebuilt.
I think the argument is that Linux as a whole doesn't progress much because new projects constantly replace old projects without actually improving the underlying issues. X11 is old and has a bunch of issues, but those issues have largely been addresses, whereas Wayland is new and neat, but has a lot of issues that won't be addressed for years to come.
X only exists because it pre-dates Linux and Open-Source in general. It was developed at Stanford and spread to MIT and became a de-facto standard in academic computer labs. It came from the need for a graphics stack. Wayland, conversely, is what you get when the Linux community tries to create their own thing from scratch. True to Conway's Law, it's a loose confederacy of mini-projects that are all equally "wayland". Just look at hyprland, which the community tried to eject, yet people still use it.
> There are multiple cases of this: OBS can't screen record (it segfaults instead), I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol.
Yeah. And? They did that. On my Wayland desktop, copy and paste works fine, window previews work fine, OBS screen capture works fine.
> The actual "threat model" here is baffling and doesn't seem to reflect a need for users. Applications are not able to see each other's windows, but they're not able to interact in any other way that could potentially cause problems?
In any other way? The last paragraph just explained the other way.
That's when I stopped reading. If they can't even make a coherent, reasonable argument from the start and instead just blast out a bunch of bullshit, no one should be listening.
I was going to ask, why hasn't anyone ported NeXTSTEP to modern architectures? It was a pretty decent windowing system. Then I realized duh that's what Apple did with OS X. Too bad they ruined it.
X11 is not secure and I guess some folks in the open source community are so lazy to implement a dialog box that asks for permission to take a screenshot that they will literally write blog posts about it for 10 years instead of just writing some code.
Honestly as someone who mostly operates my computer instead of tinkering I don't care whether X or Wayland or something else, I just want something non-opinionated that works reliably. X doesn't support palm rejection so I can't use my stylus/touchscreen for note taking. Wayland doesn't pass through the pen properly (??) leading to glitches and full screen disabling the pen until I restart the wacom kernel module.
Apparently this bug has been fixed in Ubuntu 26.04 and it's to do with Mutter actually. We'll see when I upgrade.
Look, it's a done deal. Some of the choices Wayland made are not to my liking, there will be a long term cost (even static linking won't save you from differing protocol implementations). But it's done and there's no point in complaining.
(Running X11 right now, I'll switch when the distro forces me to, in hope I'll get a bug free experience after everyone else runs it)
In short, this reads like a mix of valid historical pain points and outdated assumptions.
The post frames Wayland security as “you can’t do anything,” but that’s a misunderstanding. Even under X11, any app can log keystrokes, read window contents, and inject input into other apps. Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.
Moreover, the performance argument is weak and somewhat contradictory. The author claims there is no clear performance win, and that it's sometimes slower and hardware improvements make it irrelevant. But Wayland reduces copies and avoids X11 roundtrips (architectural win). Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver).
The NVIDIA argument is also dated. Sure, support was historically bad due to EGLStreams vs GBM, but this has improved significantly in recent driver releases.
Many cited issues are outdated too. OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.
I've been using Wayland exclusively on Fedora and Fedora Asahi Remix systems for many years alongside Sway (and occasionally GNOME and KDE). Adoption has accelerated in many distros, and XWayland for legacy apps is excellent (although I believe using the word "legacy" here would be a trigger word for the author ;-).
There's no stagnation here... what we're looking at is a slow migration of a foundational layer, which historically always takes a decade or more in the Linux world.
This reads like AI/FSD-bro speak: "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!".
> Wayland security
Okay, that's great, but why would I care? If you can implement those security wins transparently in the background, cool. Otherwise, what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.
> OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.
Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities.
> "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!"
Exactly. And it's standard rhetoric for the wayland fanboys. "The fix for this was committed 15 minutes ago! You just need to check out the unstable branch and recompile!"
> what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.
Yeah, the security theatre thing is also part of their standard rhetoric. It's a good bit of rhetoric because it scares people who don't know better. They all love to talk about how it's just so insecure to allow us to do things that every desktop environment has been able to do for 30+ years.
But strangely, in decades, I've never seen a single example of anyone taking advantage of this horrible security design and it becoming a widespread problem in the wild. I keep asking the wayland bros to give me an example of this happening in the wild and causing a problem that's even mildly widespread. Strangely when I ask that question they always seem to forget to respond to that part of my post and move on to their next piece of standard rhetoric.
> Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities
Tsk tsk, now you're just being cynical. We should be celebrating that wayland has managed to kinda-sorta get a feature working which was working just fine in X11 by ~1998, and which worked just fine in Windows <3.1, and which worked just fine in Mac OS in the 1980s. And they've managed to do it in only ~3 years longer than it took to get Duke Nukem Forever into stores! Yay them!
In my experience I have found the xdg-desktop-portal for whatever reason to be completely non functional on Arch/Hyprland. It must be an issue with my config but on x11 I never had to think about this
> Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.
The problem is old (and even not so old) apps don't expose those APIs so interactions like UI automation on Wayland is limited, if not impossible. I'd love to grant a specific permission just for selected GUI apps, but I can't because they don't support it.
There's a reason why RPA software on Wayland is limited to web apps inside a browser. Or something extremely janky like taking screenshots of the entire desktop and doing OCR. But then you can't interact with unfocused apps.
116 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 93.2 ms ] threadDevelopers have to decide which DE they'll have their applications run in rather than having your application be able to function across all linux desktops. This is different than how it was the last 20 years. No matter what else you say, this is a change from how it was. It's massive fragmentation of the userspace.
Literally the only wayland DE that supports screen readers right now is GNOME's mutter and that's mostly just for GNOME's software because of course they invented something new to work around the problems of the wayland architecture.
>The original conceit behind Wayland is to only implement what is needed for a simple Linux desktop
And this is my biggest issue with Wayland. If it started out with portability in mind maybe I would give it a try. But I am sticking with X because it is fully usable on the BSDs.
Were they just supposed to keep working on the massive pile of hacks they felt needed abandoning?
They did what they thought was best. You hate it. Fine.
Do you think things would be better if they kept working on the unfixable mess?
I trust them to know what was going on better than random commenters.
Sometimes it's worse to live in a mess that is being constantly fixed I guess.
His pain is that it's been 17 years and some basic core functionality is either still broken or entirely missing. It's not my expertise so I don't know if it could have been planned any better, but 17 years and _basics_ still being broken doesn't sound great.
wl-copy works fine, askpass works, copy and paste works, screen sharing with Google Meet works, drag and drop works. Using an iphone as a webcam works as does recording my screen.
Most importantly using multiple monitors with fractional scaling works perfectly. AFIAK this is not possible to do well (at all?) on X11, which is a complete show stopper for me.
If anyone's reading this and sitting on the fence, I would really give Fedora a go. I've found it so much more polished than Ubuntu, and loads of things which didn't work on it work out of the box on Fedora (at least compared to 24.04 LTS).
The rule should be if Wayland isn’t going to supply a timely answer, software developers should target an implementation of whatever missing feature as implemented in X11. That is the only way to move forward if the threat of X11 coming back exists.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool i3 (now sway) user. I don't even use floating windows. Wayland has still been an awful experience, broke a bunch of workflows for me
And using X is a noticeably worse experience.
I'am excited to follow the still very early development of xfwl to see how a classic DE works in wayland.
So as an end user, I don’t get all the hubbub. Reminds me a bit of the whole systemd craze from some time ago.
I understand complaints about systemd, I don't understand the complaints about Wayland. This whole article sounds like a big rant and doesn't seem to bring much information.
> I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language.
Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".
> In fact, you can find examples showing roughly a 40% slowdown when using Wayland over X11! I'm sure there are similar benchmarks claiming Wayland wins and vice versa (happy to link them as well if provided).
"I am gonna make a bad argument and follow it by saying that you could make the same bad argument to say the opposite". Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at performance.
> Anecdotal experience is not enough to say this is a broad issue, but my point is that when an average user encounters graphical issues within 60 seconds of using it, maybe it's not ready to be made the default!
So the whole article is built around ranting while saying "I don't have anything meaningful to say, I'll just share an anecdote and directly say it's not worth much because it's an anecdote"?
> But the second actual users are forced to use it expect them to be frustrated!
Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.
I can no longer use GNOME on X11, and the decision to remove support was a deliberate one. Users are definitely being forced.
Let's instead get excited by all the new linux users coming in thanks to SteamOS and Valve. If the trend continues, we might start seeing larger software companies releasing native linux versions of their software -- and then, the year of the linux desktop will start becoming an actual possibility!
(I heard affinity suite is linux friendly now btw, and davinci resolve too -- not sure if proton is necessary or not, but either way, really cool)
https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...
Recent versions of gnome session are compiled only with wayland support in archlinux. To change DE or distribution or use custom package is quite a stretch to call it's not forced.
> Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".
I think the argument is not that X11 defeats it all - but that for 99.9999% of users its security theater when deployed in the real world. Most commonly, as long as processes can read each other's memory/configuration/etc.
I'm sure there is a use-case for untrusted sharing of Wayland enabled GPU rendering or something - though AFAIK none of the enterprise remote desktop use it, and they have the resources to implement it themselves anyway.
I've been running Wayland for two years now. I still hit weird bugs with desktop sharing / obs tinkering; It's just not a critical use for me.
So it's fair to question the design wisdom of adding the complexity and UX pain points if it seems to be worth so little.
But maybe i'm overlooking some large group of people dependent on Wayland security boundaries?
Instead of bundling forces to improve a single implementation like it was the case with X11, now everybody and their mother writes their own incomplete implementation of the Wayland protocol, and badly. I don't understand how anybody thinks that this mess is a good thing. At least for X11 on Linux there was a single implementation that contributors could focus on, now the bugs are spread over dozens of projects. If I'd like to sabotage the entire desktop-Linux idea, this is exactly how I would do it ;(
Anyone who wants to continue using a modern, actively-developed desktop environment. GNOME has dropped X11; KDE has announced the transition. I would consider being told "use Wayland, or find a different desktop environment" being forced, even though nobody has actually put a gun to my head.
I have managed to make Wayland work for me, but only by patching away the hardcoded gestures. I also developed a means to start and stop XScreenSaver, although that is thankfully now obsolete thanks to some work by JWZ. Just yesterday I still had issues with an entire window of text gibbering up and down in VSCode at a certain scaling level (used to have that in Firefox, as well, but it was evidently fixed).
To put a positive conspiratorial spin on the recent Wayland push: maybe they think that taking away the option to fall back to X11 will finally get enough eyes on Wayland to fix its remaining issues.
The changes are being done by small steps and I'd say this removal of fallback to X11 option counts as such.
The last time a distro tried to sell me on it, it left me unable to drag/drop browser tabs to reorder them (a fundamental part of my daily workflow). Thankfully, Mint still has the option to use X11 so reverting was trivial. That won't always be the case because...
> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.
Which, like avoiding systemd, is becoming increasingly difficult as distributions prematurely switch. Like when some Linux distros made KDE4 the default (~20 years ago) before most graphics cards could actually handle KDE4's requirements. Switching distros after years, even decades, of use is not as trivial as distro-hoppers who swap out their distro every three weeks might like to think. Lots of know-how and muscle memory gets lost in the transition, both of which have to be rebuilt.
Yeah. And? They did that. On my Wayland desktop, copy and paste works fine, window previews work fine, OBS screen capture works fine.
> The actual "threat model" here is baffling and doesn't seem to reflect a need for users. Applications are not able to see each other's windows, but they're not able to interact in any other way that could potentially cause problems?
In any other way? The last paragraph just explained the other way.
That's when I stopped reading. If they can't even make a coherent, reasonable argument from the start and instead just blast out a bunch of bullshit, no one should be listening.
Everything coming from them is corporate slop. Systemd is another mess coming from them.
Apparently this bug has been fixed in Ubuntu 26.04 and it's to do with Mutter actually. We'll see when I upgrade.
(Running X11 right now, I'll switch when the distro forces me to, in hope I'll get a bug free experience after everyone else runs it)
The post frames Wayland security as “you can’t do anything,” but that’s a misunderstanding. Even under X11, any app can log keystrokes, read window contents, and inject input into other apps. Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.
Moreover, the performance argument is weak and somewhat contradictory. The author claims there is no clear performance win, and that it's sometimes slower and hardware improvements make it irrelevant. But Wayland reduces copies and avoids X11 roundtrips (architectural win). Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver).
The NVIDIA argument is also dated. Sure, support was historically bad due to EGLStreams vs GBM, but this has improved significantly in recent driver releases.
Many cited issues are outdated too. OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.
I've been using Wayland exclusively on Fedora and Fedora Asahi Remix systems for many years alongside Sway (and occasionally GNOME and KDE). Adoption has accelerated in many distros, and XWayland for legacy apps is excellent (although I believe using the word "legacy" here would be a trigger word for the author ;-).
There's no stagnation here... what we're looking at is a slow migration of a foundational layer, which historically always takes a decade or more in the Linux world.
> Wayland security
Okay, that's great, but why would I care? If you can implement those security wins transparently in the background, cool. Otherwise, what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.
> OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.
Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities.
But strangely, in decades, I've never seen a single example of anyone taking advantage of this horrible security design and it becoming a widespread problem in the wild. I keep asking the wayland bros to give me an example of this happening in the wild and causing a problem that's even mildly widespread. Strangely when I ask that question they always seem to forget to respond to that part of my post and move on to their next piece of standard rhetoric.
Tsk tsk, now you're just being cynical. We should be celebrating that wayland has managed to kinda-sorta get a feature working which was working just fine in X11 by ~1998, and which worked just fine in Windows <3.1, and which worked just fine in Mac OS in the 1980s. And they've managed to do it in only ~3 years longer than it took to get Duke Nukem Forever into stores! Yay them!The problem is old (and even not so old) apps don't expose those APIs so interactions like UI automation on Wayland is limited, if not impossible. I'd love to grant a specific permission just for selected GUI apps, but I can't because they don't support it.
There's a reason why RPA software on Wayland is limited to web apps inside a browser. Or something extremely janky like taking screenshots of the entire desktop and doing OCR. But then you can't interact with unfocused apps.