TechTakes

for Wayland, the issue is unfortunately outside of the core protocol. the core protocol doesn’t implement everything you need for a functional desktop, and some of the omissions are utterly obvious things. the ecosystem makes up for that with protocol extensions, but some (all?) of the important ones are proprietary to a particular compositor and considered part of its internal API. also, because Wayland has a frankly pretty broken security model (everything is utterly locked down and as far as I can tell no exceptions are possible via permission modals or any other mechanism), some types of applications are only possible via fragile hacks. gnome has many of these proprietary protocols because Wayland is essentially under the same umbrella and so it has a privileged position; KDE is in a close second. every other compositor has severely reduced functionality.

for more details, see jwz’s recent blog posts where he failed to port xscreensaver to Wayland because some of the utterly basic functionality he needed was compositor-specific. the hyprland wiki’s compatibility page is also relevant because all of those problems tend to be rooted in this too, though I of course don’t recommend trusting them as a source. Asahi Linux also has a ton of issues on their github around hyprland that I believe boil down to protocol issues. unfortunately these issues tend to be hidden from public view because they’re spread out across a hundred rants and a hundred discussions in FreeDesktop’s Wayland protocol committee; a properly formatted Mastodon search might also be informative.

(counting down the seconds until some Wayland dev wanders in and tells me I’m completely wrong about everything because an uncharitable reading of one of the paragraphs above reveals I’m wrong about some minor point and besides what am I saying, everyone should be on xlibre? toxic little fucks)