Without speaking too much FUD from the X11 side the main issues facing workstation use cases are input handling and permissions. The current wayland party line is "just use dbus to communicate between windows." This is complete madness because it basically means that if you want programs to be able to work together and not steal each others keybinds they all have to depend on a message passing framework. Full disclosure I have done everything in my power to avoid installing dbus and having dbus dependencies, but it is getting harder and harder. That said, it doesn't matter what you think about dbus, it is completely unrealistic to expect that every piece of gui software written for linux to be rewritten to include dbus. This is basically going back to the days of cooperative multitasking and I think we all know how that ended, the overhead is just too high.

What exactly do you mean by "stealing each other keybindings"? From what you have described so far, it would seem to me that you are describing problem specific to X11 where global keybindings are often implemented in spyware manner, i.e., listening to all keyboard events (regardless of current window focus) and reacting accordingly. They may conflict with each other, they may interfere with each other, they may spy on user, in other words they are not working together at all.

There is no standard way to register global keybindings under Wayland yet, but this is bound to happen eventually. Not as a builtin part of Wayland, but it doesn't matter. It will of course use D-Bus interface, as KDE does it now for example - but if an application doesn't support this interface, it can't steal keybindings, it just doesn't get to install global keybindings itself.

Not sure what you have exactly against D-Bus, but clearly modern Linux desktop embraced it.

I have something against dbus. Bout the protocol and the implementation are very much over-engineered. The protocol at least has an excuse.

In the desktop things, that wayland aims to do, dbus is useless. (actually i don't know what it's useful for at all, other then quickly hacking some object oriented (gui)client-server desktop program)

I do recommend reading the dbus protocol (the protocol, not the API).

Sorry to sound negative but "modern linux" now means "desktop crap", and it is all crap. Freedesktop.org (the linux "desktop" "standards" authority) has gone from "ehh, passable" to "complete crap" in the last... idk 5-10 years (the "desktop" quoting is because it has gone pass the actual desktop problems).

I only follow Linux graphics casually, but AIUI one of the principles of the Wayland initiative was to replace the monolithic model of X with a combination of more tightly scoped components. For example, libinput was created to take responsibility for actually handling input devices, so that Wayland compositors would never need to carry that code, and the input device handling in X could be decommissioned.

From that point of view, "Wayland" is kind of a short-hand for a number of different stacks that have some components in common, and speak the Wayland protocol. If you choose not to use a complete stack on a system, then the result can't be fully functional.

Personally, I don't have any sense of how much dark matter is in the area of Linux GUI applications. We can easily know about Open Source, where most modern applications sit on toolkits and desktops that are moving to Wayland, but presumably places like CERN have some really old internal applications that will only ever run on X until they are replaced. I'm genuinely unsure how large that problem is.

I have to say that I'm always skeptical about arguments that something can't be done for performance reasons. People have been using that argument against new technology since at least the days when C was decried as new-fangled, decadent luxury.

Can you provide an actual example of what is impossible without dbus? Getting mouse/keyboard input for your window is part of libwayland, and not dependent on dbus at all.