Wayland seems ready to me but the main problem that many programs are not configured / compiled to support it. Why is that? I know it’s not easy as “Wayland support? Yes” (but in many cases adding a flag is enough but maybe it’s not a perfect support). What am I missing? Even Blender says if it fails to use Wayland it will use X11.
When Wayland is detected, it is the preferred system, otherwise X11 will be used
Also XWayland has many limitations as X11 does.
As someone who tries to look under the hood for a lot of the open source software I run, one thing that I have noticed is that there are a lot of cases where the general sentiment seems to be
port to what. Wayland still doesn’t support a number of things that some applications require. A lot of developers that I have interacted with would rather have the app run through XWayland rather than have a wayland version of the app with less features or certain features grayed out.In the case of one project in paticular, that being the Sunshine game streaming project. I have personally witnessed. Them implementing a solution for wlroots based compositor. Having that solution eventually break as wlroots based projects deprecate the protocol they were using in favor of a new one and now that protocol is looking like it too is old news and is going to be deprecated in favor of a newer and better protocol. What I am getting at here is that protocols not existing isn’t the only problem, but things are still very much in development. Even applications that implemented wayland support are being put in positions where they need yet another rewrite because things are far from finalized and still moving pretty fast.
That’s a terrible example, because they completely ignore the many many years old standardized APIs (screen casting and remote desktop portals) that they could use, in favor of doing hacky and broken things that require root access instead.
Even then, is that a documentation and centralized standards issue? Was there some list they could have/should have looked to that said ‘this is how that is implemented on Wayland vs X’?
The github repo has tons of issues about the problems caused by the hacks (from the cursor not being recorded, to it not working in Flatpak, not working with virtual displays, to even preventing graphical sessions from starting!) with the suggested solution of just using the remote desktop portal… I don’t know what the problem is, but it’s not a lack of knowledge.
So summarizing Wayland is not ready yet for everyone and current Wayland support can easily be broken with newer releases?