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Comment by doodlesdev | Hacker News Reader

2 and 3 are big problems and are making me consider switch back to Xorg as it's made some stuff impossible to do. Not having stuff like Redshift is also a big bummer and makes me think if the people behind Wayland have any idea how people actually use computers.

My general perception of it is that it has many good design decisions from the point of software architecture and security, but they are too cumbersome to add stuff to Wayland that is absolutely needed for desktops. The result is that people end up finding a way to do that stuff anyway in the implementations and the ecosystem becomes a fragmented mess that somehow works worse than legacy Xorg.

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"Redshift" doesn't work, but there are many alternatives that do work for Wayland like Gammastep or Wlsunset.

That is true, although I've seen the support being cumbersome at best, specially with Nvidia drivers (although can't put the blame on anyone else other than Nvidia here obviously) even the default Gnome night light doesn't work as it should always.

Wayland is not preventing screen sharing or recoring. The API supports it pretty well. Problem is that existing applications need to adapt for its use, and if the demand is low, it is not worth the money.

It sounds like you are supporting the author's claim that Wayland will never be a 1:1 replacement for xorg.

To be fair for it to be a 1:1 replacement for xorg that does not mean it also needs to be drop-in (as in all software that works on xorg will work on Wayland right away).

I see your point, but in defense of the metaphor: in your world, we have 1 and 1 but they are not equal.

These 1 and 1 are equal, not not identical, if that's what you meant.

Yes it does.

The solution is to use Pipewire and DBus to connect to proprietary APIs.

The arguement whether it is the correct location to provide a standardised API is a separate one. But Wayland does not support this.

> The solution is to use Pipewire and DBus to connect to proprietary APIs.

I don't understand this at all. Can you open a bit more? To my understanding, current screen recording is relying mainly on xdg-desktop-portal and it's variations. It depends on flatpak and glib and uses D-bus. None of these are proprietary to my knowledge.

With these, it supports WebRTC out of the box for browser, and for example OBS studio supports natively, and works really well.

Apps need to implement and use org.freedesktop.portal.* interfaces to support screen recording in Wayland.

Proprietary is probably the wrong word. Non-standardised perhaps, specific to the desktop implementation and by implementing the Wayland specification does not give you appropriate screensharing APIs in that namespace.

Because the APIs that are exposed by Gnome, KDE, and wl-roots are all different. Flatpak has access to the `xdg-desktop-portal.*` namespace, but everyone has their own implementation so saying they use the standard namespace is misleading as it makes it sound like all the work is done.

Pipewire masks all that by implementing everyone's API and then exposing this via the Pipewire API, neatly solving the Wayland limitation and providing a standard.

The original statement was:

> Wayland is not preventing screen sharing or recoring. The API supports it pretty well.

No it does not. Pipewire does.

I see now. Thanks for the info.

This is a fight implementations cannot win.

So there is demand for API. Gnome, KDE, wl-roots implement it, in the discovery phase by their unique way, so we have 3 different APIs. Then, once the requirements are known, standardization happens and every compositor implements the standard API. So far, good.

But what happens with the old, experimental APIs? Because meanwhile, there are apps, that do use them. Remove the old APIs and you will have cries on the Internets, how you break compatibility again (even if you announce deprecation plan years upfront). Do not remove them, and you have complains, that every compositor has its own API (ignoring, that there is a standardized one too, now).

So, there's no pleasing everyone. Someone will complain.

> No it does not. Pipewire does.

xdg-deskop-portal-(gnome|kde|wlr), among other things, which do include desktop-specific dialogs related to the functionality.

Of course they will. Normally though you have a roadmap with features that people want and screensharing was not a feature that Wayland wanted to get involved in because it runs against their ideology.

That is simply all we are talking about. I don't think the situation that we are in now is terrible, it's just a shame that Wayland ignored it and so it's taken much longer than it should to get it in place.

I've had no problems with KDE's native Redshift clone on Wayland.

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