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Comment by calcifer | Hacker News Reader

> Expect supporting wayland properly

Doing what everyone else does != doing it properly

> I wouldn't call this excellent at all

So far Wayland support is most further in Gnome and even there a lot of features are still missing/broken despite Wayland being well over a decade old at this point. A lot of very basic features (remote desktop, screen sharing, exclusive fullscreen, keyboard/mouse shortcuts) are still in their infancy. Not to mention both Gnome and KDE have implemented their Wayland compositor inside the shell process so now a compositor crash means you lose all your open apps which hasn't been a problem in Linux for decades.

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> A lot of very basic features (remote desktop, screen sharing, exclusive fullscreen, keyboard/mouse shortcuts) are still in their infancy.

- remote desktop: good point. Considering that screen recordings work fine, I don't see a technical reason that a Wayland remote desktop setup couldn't work.

- exclusive fullscreen: what do you mean by this? Using Firefox, F11 and Super-F both work in Sway and F11 works with GNOME.

- keyboard/mouse shortcuts: maybe? The fact that a random process can no longer read all of your keystrokes seems like a plus, to me. Otherwise, just add a shortcut to your window manager or DE and run a command of your choice.

- losing all apps on compositor restart: Only an issue with GNOME and KDE. Pressing Super-Shift-C on Sway reloads the compositor and not your apps.

Exclusive fullscreen = application runs directly on the screenbuffer, bypassing the compositor. Not just that a window happens to be taking up the whole screen.

This is never going to exist the same way it did in X, which was a hack around the X display model.

It doesn't matter how it is going to exist, what matters is for it to exist.

Well--no, not in the same way, but it can still be a hint passed along somewhere, to allow the compositor to swap out its root framebuffer for the program's.

> The fact that a random process can no longer read all of your keystrokes seems like a plus

It is a plus, unless you write software that allows for global keyboard/mouse shortcuts (which I have done). In which case it is just a huge pain in the ass to not have it, and then hearing from some developers that you can just "add a shortcut to your window manager" is incredibly frustrating. It's not like you can trust an average end-user to actually do so, even the ones that do run linux. Then you will get complained at for not having functionality that existed at some point in the past.

Screen sharing is quite important in my workflow. Fellow developers and customers will send me buying Windows or a Mac if all screen sharing applications on Linux stop working. I'm using Slack and Meet. Skype is almost abandoned among my customers.

I would like to see the approach your pronning of "not doing like others" applied to some other protocols like TCP. Networking would be really fun and Internet a great success. The very concept of a protocol is that everybody does the same, the underlying implementation is different.

Wayland and its current limitations have nothing to do with, and does not excuse neither, nvidia's non-compliant implementation.

The protocol is over a decade old; the implementations of it are not.

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