I don't understand where you're getting this idea that Wayland is or was supposed to do all the same things as X in exactly the same way. It's not, that's the entire point. As an end-user you can continue to use what works for you. Yes X is much more flexible at some things (and Wayland is more flexible at others) but it comes at a cost which is expounded on by the article.
> I don't understand where you're getting this idea that Wayland is or was supposed to do all the same things as X in exactly the same way. It's not, that's the entire point.
Ahh, classic: blame the user.
You are wrong for expecting things to work in a way that's familiar!
Global hotkey bindings? Sure, that works on Windows, macOS, and X, but it doesn't on Wayland and its your fault for expecting it.
The beatings will continue until morale improves!
> As an end-user you can continue to use what works for you.
LOL, Wayland is literally being marketed as the replacement for X. It's even the default display server in Debian, Ubuntu, and (I think?) Fedora.
Why are you surprised that people therefore expect stuff that works in X to work in Wayland?
> Global hotkey bindings? Sure, that works on Windows, macOS, and X, but it doesn't on Wayland and its your fault for expecting it.
It's not that. It's that global hotkey bindings are out of scope for a Wayland compositor. But don't worry. An API for such things for the crufty d-bus broker should be dropping aaaaaaany minute now... then all you have to do is wait for your compositor to support it!
Please tone down the rhetoric, I'm not blaming anybody. X is still included on those distros as a fallback option in case you have something that doesn't work.
Re global hotkey bindings: Can you please describe your setup to me? I honestly have no idea what you're talking about, global hotkeys were supported in all the Wayland implementations I tried recently. (KDE, GNOME, Sway, Wayfire)
> Please tone down the rhetoric, I'm not blaming anybody.
I understand that's not your intention, but that's effectively what you're doing.
I'm a former developer who moved into product management a long time ago, and I've seen the syndrome.
"I understand what you want, but we didn't build it that way, so you need to change your expectations" places the onus on the user to change their behaviour, instead of on the developer to build the thing the user actually wants.
> X is still included on those distros as a fallback option in case you have something that doesn't work.
The trouble is, a neophyte will a) have no idea what the difference is between Wayland and Xorg, and b) not realize that switching might fix whatever issue they're encountering.
And BTW, this all presumes that a distro installs Xorg at all. If not, you've gotta dive into the package manager, which adds an additional barrier since you need to know what to look for and install.
> Re global hotkey bindings: Can you please describe your setup to me? I honestly have no idea what you're talking about, global hotkeys were supported in all the Wayland implementations I tried recently. (KDE, GNOME, Sway, Wayfire)
It certainly doesn't.
Two examples that immediately spring to mind:
Guake, a handy pop-up terminal. In X I can press F12 anywhere and it opens. Super handy for quick terminal interactions, always-on commandline tools, etc.
Gnome Do or equivalent. Basically Quicksilver for Linux. Fast search, command execution, etc, from the keyboard. Hit a hotkey and it pops up.
Right now the way this works is that the compositor binds the key and then... does stuff. But that requires these applications to be redesigned to support that. For example, guake added a whole separate binary, 'guake-toggle', and it's only job is to toggle visibility.
Unfortunately, that requires the user to know that they need to go into their compositor settings, bind the key, and set it to run that application.
Meanwhile, on literally any other OS, this would be handled with a config setting right in the application.
Maybe eventually be addressed with yet-another-dbus-protocol, but right now it's just a gaping functional regression.
> The trouble is, a neophyte will a) have no idea what the difference is between Wayland and Xorg, and b) not realize that switching might fix whatever issue they're encountering.
But they're definitely clever enough to be using xdotool. Lol.
Wayland may not fit with everyone, which is fine, no one is taking X away from you. But allow the vast majority of users to have their scaling displays and multiple monitor setups, which is far more common than your requirements. I'm sorry Wayland hasn't come far enough yet to cover you as well, but it's far enough for the vast majority of users. You bring up xdotool in everything thread as if it's something that Grandma uses Linux for. It's not.
> And BTW, this all presumes that a distro installs Xorg at all. If not, you've gotta dive into the package manager, which adds an additional barrier since you need to know what to look for and install.
So be honest what you're arguing for. You, as an accomplished unix user, want distro defaults to be tailored to your use case. That's not what distro defaults are there for.
And regarding global hotkeys? Something which before would involve going into an application's settings and seeing "Choose hotkey for X", a la Windows, now involves going into the compositor's settings, adding a hotkey, knowing what the command line is and how to achieve X via the command line, understanding how launching commands can affect already-running instances of applications, adding a hotkey there...
I think we should acknowledge many people have grandmas who build desktop operating systems, so this is perhaps a source of misunderstanding :b
What kind of global hotkeys are we talking about that casual everyday users need, as opposed to people who build their own desktop OS from parts?
We all tried the universal frictionless global hotkeys thing. It was a really bad idea for a general audience [1]. That's why we have MPRIS for global media player controls (Firefox supports it now, which is awesome!), and stuff like the keyboard shortcut inhibit protocol for VMs and the like. It's unfortunate for the building an OS from parts thing, but unlike cars and smartphones, at least it is still all open source.
Interesting, I just noticed MacOS allows normally global keybindings to be overridden by applications that really want to override them.
So for example, doing Command-Tab in the VNC viewer will tab through applications on the VNC server you're connected to, which makes sense because you feel like you're using that other desktop. But everywhere else, Command-Tab is intercepted by the window manager and tabs through the local applications.
Same for other hotkeys that are usually universal, like the one that takes screenshots and screen recordings (which are both done really nicely in MacOS by the way), or the one that lets you search for anything.
> I'll repeat: please tone it down, this is not the way to contribute to open source.
I don’t have a dog in the Wayland-X fight, but I don’t see any excess or unproductive rhetoric in GP’s contributions here. They seem factual and specific with some background thrown in. When you twice asked for it to be toned down, I went looking to find offense and couldn’t.
Contributing to open-source by stating concerns as a user of the system is a minor positive way to contribute. Writing docs for workarounds is a greater positive. Contributing code patches is a yet greater way, but those don’t take away from the fact the filing bugs (literally or conversationally) is still a positive action.
I also apologize if I was seen as being rude or demanding or condescending but my request was sincere. I don't find that type of conversation to be productive and all I can do when it's directed at me is ask someone nicely to stop. I'll repost the other part of my post because I think it gets to the substance of the issue.
Re global hotkeys: I still don't understand your complaint. You just described two applications that didn't work and then went on to explain how one of them was made to work on Wayland. Yes, applications need to be ported, no solution on the Wayland side will ever change that. If the complaint is that the chosen method adds latency, or that the config setting has moved, those are vastly different than your original complaint which is that it doesn't work. Is that closer to what you were getting at?
> Re global hotkeys: I still don't understand your complaint. You just described two applications that didn't work and then went on to explain how one of them was made to work on Wayland. Yes, applications need to be ported, no solution on the Wayland side will ever change that. If the complaint is that the chosen method adds latency, or that the config setting has moved, those are vastly different than your original complaint which is that it doesn't work. Is that closer to what you were getting at?
Let's compare the workflows.
In X, in order to make guake open by pressing "F12" on the keyboard (which, by the way, is probably the feature that makes guake useful, since its entire purpose is to be a terminal you can pop up with a hotkey), I have to take the following steps:
1. Install Guake
2. Run Guake
That's it (F12 is the default hotkey for guake). It just works.
And it's the kind of thing that's possible on literally every other desktop OS that's ever existed prior to Wayland coming along.
Here's the steps I have to take when using mutter specifically.
1. Install Guake.
2. Realize F12 doesn't work because, in the Wayland ecosystem today, it is impossible for an application to bind a global hotkey.
3. Find a workaround online. Discover "guake-toggle" exists and that I have to manually bind a hotkey to call it.
4. Open the Gnome hotkey configuration screen.
5. Add a new binding for F12. Enter "/usr/bin/guake-toggle" as the command to execute when the key is pressed.
(actually, that's a lie, my vague recollection is you can't actually bind F12 at all in Gnome and so I used F11 as my test... but that's a whole other thing and probably a Gnome bug)
However:
1. This set of steps only works with mutter. For another wayland compositor the steps may be completely different. Or there may be no steps at all if the compositor doesn't have some mechanism to specify a global hotkey.
2. It happens to work with Guake because the author realized a wayland compositor was gonna need a workaround, and they created guake-toggle. For other applications it's possible no such workaround exists at all.
3. It's in any case a profound UX regression.
Now, yes, you can make the claim that guake was "made to work on Wayland".
But if your claim is that therefore nothing is wrong in this situation, I have to admit to simple astonishment and bafflement because I don't know how anyone could not see a problem here.
Now, to be clear: I'm not suggesting this is the sole issue that's preventing my use of Wayland. There is, after all, this crappy workaround.
Rather, as a reminder, this thread started with my replying to this remark:
> I don't understand where you're getting this idea that Wayland is or was supposed to do all the same things as X in exactly the same way.
I hope you can see that my issue isn't that I expect Wayland to "do all the same things as X in exactly the same way".
Rather, I expect Wayland to enable applications to offer the same kind of basic functionality, with the same level of usability, that users are used to experiencing with applications, not just on X, but on any modern desktop operating system.
This is just one example where that's actually not possible today due to immaturity in the ecosystem.
In the first post, it was suggested that I was blaming someone. There is nobody there to blame, it seems more like a misunderstanding or a case of missed expectations, which is why I said I didn't understand. In the second post, it was suggested that my request for clarification means I have some sort of "syndrome" which was based on a misrepresentation of my position. I don't find this to be productive conversation.
I'd love to talk about bugs but I have no interest in talking about them if it involves this kind of behavior. And I don't have a dog in any fight either—both of these projects will likely be around for a very long time.
> I don't understand where you're getting this idea that Wayland is or was supposed to do all the same things as X
This entire post is about Xorg becoming abandonware. People are expressing why they're not willing to switch to Wayland, citing lack of features they use.
> As an end-user you can continue to use what works for you.
Until Xorg becomes unmaintained and eventually breaks. Wayland is not being put forth as an option. The idea is that X will eventually be unsupported.
Yes it does, but that's not going to stop people from expressing themselves online or discuss the disadvantages of what's coming.
Besides, realistically speaking, not everyone is capable enough to do that. Their only way to contribute is to let the web know that not everyone prefers Wayland and why. Discussions like these are like feature requests and bug reports, only broader, encompassing multiple projects. Some people might interpret that as entitled b____ing, but then apparently so are feature requests and bug reports sometimes.
