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Comment by taway098123 | Hacker News Reader

That's not a Wayland problem. The features you're asking for are probably still there but they're implemented at a different spot in the stack instead of trying to stuff everything into the same protocol like in X11. This is actually done to reduce fragmentation. Make a service its own daemon with a dbus interface or something like that, and then it can run the same on X or on any Wayland compositor.

In my experience it's actually the simplicity of building window managers in X11 that's misleading. It's easy to get something up and running that lets you move windows around, but to build a full desktop that does everything you'd expect is a giant task, and X11 only really gets in the way of that.

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> That's not a Wayland problem.

Exactly, "not a Wayland problem". That's the problem with Wayland, nothing is a Wayland problem.

> Make a service its own daemon with a dbus interface or something like that

I don't know if I should cry or laugh at this.

Not sure why you'd laugh or cry. Dbus is just an example. You can use another mechanism to build another daemon, it doesn't have to be built on anything in particular. I'm just saying, if you expect that Wayland is going to solve every problem you had with your desktop, you're setting yourself up to be disappointed. It solves a few specific problems. You can solve the other problems in ways that reduce fragmentation, but you'll have to look in other places.

> solve the other problems in ways that reduce fragmentation

> look in other places

There's a contradiction here. How do you expect to avoid fragmentation if adding additional protocols alongside Wayland is required? I mean, obviously there won't be just one protocol. This idea is actually a common joke, there's even an XKCD on the topic.

You misunderstand. In both situations, you're making a new protocol. The only difference is you'd be making your own thing instead of adding new packet types to Wayland. And why add new packet types to Wayland if the thing you're trying to do can be done outside the Wayland socket? Best example is Pipewire and screensharing. People ask for screensharing in Wayland but it makes a lot more sense to have it in Pipewire because it can handle all the other tasks related to video streaming like format negotiation and compression. It works headless and independent of any compositor, the fact that it can also be used to do screensharing is a benefit of its design.

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