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Comment by d3Xt3r | Hacker News Reader

Ah, goody. Looks like I found the only other Wayland user on HN. ;)

You should also post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837981

On the KDE side, Wayland has been going pretty well. Wayland sessions make up 82% of all sessions with telemetry enabled.

https://blogs.kde.org/2025/03/15/this-week-in-plasma-file-tr...

For me the real conundrum was SwayWM vs KDE Wayland rather than any X.org session; I really felt like SwayWM was a good upgrade from i3wm and gave me a better desktop session with much less hacks. Hope to see wlroots push forward and support some of the newer Wayland protocols, it has started to fall behind a little bit, but I think it's good for alternative desktops.

I run Wayland but I'm not happy about it. Most autoclickers still don't work, and autotypers need sudo and group magic to get working.

Root is definitely required to inject inputs at the kernel level using uinput, which I think is what you would hope, ignoring the fact that the typical Linux desktop still has a lot of other low hanging fruit to fix in terms of security.

Anyway though, the "standard" way to do automatic clicking and typing on Wayland is via the RemoteDesktop portal, named such because it is used with ScreenCast to support use cases like VNC and RDP servers. Despite the poor choice of name, it gives a general API for sending inputs programmatically.

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html...

This does require at least a one-time permission grant for an application to use, but at least on KDE it is possible for the permission to persist across runs.

I'm sure everyone is unenthused about having to deal with another way to do things, but it's at least decently straightforward... You could certainly invoke this from a quick Python script I reckon.

(There's also libei but it's kind of a mess imo and I don't know if it is well-supported yet.)

https://github.com/atx/wtype seems to work for me with no special permissions. (On Sway; I won't comment on other compositors.)

I get it's something you need but for the average user autotypers and clickers not working easily without permissions is a definite positive.

It's entirely the point of moving to Wayland for many.

Cool kids don't allow telemetry. I think that any software whose userbase isn't totally oblivious will have severe selection effects if you use data obtained by spying.

If the cool kids are so cool, they should learn to distinguish transparent opt-in telemetry from invasive opt-out telemetry. Unfortunately, being "cool" doesn't get your needs represented, so it's really not always in your best interests to never opt in.

> Wayland sessions make up 82% of all sessions with telemetry enabled.

That is a significant caveat.

Do you have any reason to believe that Wayland users are more likely than X users to enable telemetry?

Nothing solid. It would be entertaining if it were the opposite. But unless we have a really good reason to think we know which way it leans, the unknown unknown means I wouldn't want to trust the numbers.

On a distro with wayland as the default, users are probably defaulting to allowing telemetry as well. (maybe? Just a guess ...)

KDE telemetry is strictly opt-in, it is something that you are prompted for during the first setup wizard.

The reason Wayland users might be more likely to opt into telemetry is because they see Wayland as "developing" and therefore needing that user data for development purposes. I have no idea what the incidence would actually be, but there is certainly a potential selection bias in there.

I use Wayland! I like it a lot and I think that it's a sensible way to take window management in the 21st century. However, it's clearly not _mature_ yet (which is understandable - it's very new!). My use case specifically is a bit unusual:

1. I'm on an NVIDIA graphics card - this struggles a lot, I won't lie, and it's really odd issues which are difficult to track down. 2. I'm running Deskflow for virtual KVM - this is using literally someone's hand-rolled attempt to hack Wayland to make it work - it manages the most important element: my keyboard and mouse are shared between my Linux desktop and my MacBook - but much of the incidental functionality, most notably copy-pasting and repeating held keys, doesn't work at all. Mod keys seem a bit fucky as well.

That said, I'm committed - am excited to see the tech honed in the coming years.

> However, it's clearly not _mature_ yet (which is understandable - it's very new!)

I'm admittedly biased against Wayland because in my view it's been a disaster both in organization and technically, and I've had some very frustrating interactions, but even so there's no way it's accurate to describe Wayland as very new.

Wayland started development in 2008. Version 0.85 of the protocol and of Weston, which the devs called "the first real release", was in early 2012. KDE (KWin) started adding Wayland support in 2011.

Wayland development began almost exactly 17 years after Linus released the first 0.01 kernel. Next month Wayland turns 17. So Wayland has been in development now for half of Linux's entire existence, and it's still not mature. It started when iPhone 3G was a new top notch phone, the MacBook Air was just launched, 4G mobile networks were not yet commercially available, netbooks were highly popular, solid-state drives were just breaking into the market, and the term blockchain hadn't yet been invented.

You may like Wayland, but what you're saying is you're using the most common GPU vendor (yes everyone loves AMD's open approach to drivers, but there's a reason Nvidia dominates completely, and that's because AMD GPUs are not competitive) and basic functionality like copy-pasting and key repeats doesn't work for you. Yes Deskflow isn't the most standard setup but this is completely like my experience with Wayland. A 17 year old project and it only works for a certain set of typical setups with typical use cases the committee blessed.

I am also on Wayland (via CachyOS) and recently started using Deskflow for my MacBook KVM-type setup. Linux on one screen, Mac on the other.

Works great except for the copy-and-paste issues and the mod key resets - just as you describe. I've been fiddling with it the last couple of days.

Funny to see someone with such a similar setup and issue.

Esoteric issues aside, the general use of CachyOS has been very smooth.

There seems to be a lot of momentum for desktop Linux, with Microsoft and Apple dropping the ball lately. LLMs also make deep configuration of Linux more manageable. The stars seem to be aligning for it.

There are dozens of us…dozens!

The trick was to switch to AMD (screw NVIDIA on Linux).

I'm on Wayland with NVIDIA, it took longer to get there but it does work perfectly fine.

I count for at least two!

Wayland in Raspberry Pi OS (labwc)

Wayland in Debian: Bookworm (Sway), Trixie (labwc)

Thank you for the link! Hope to see more people using Wayland then :D

Ironic you say that, because I also use Wayland.

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