"Works for me" is a risky defence; if you are a slightly demanding Wayland user then it is fine, if you have unusually simple needs it isn't a useful contribution.

It isn't anything to do with the hardware, it is the design assumption that isolating application's input and output should be mandatory.

In hindsight; that was a design mistake. The correct design is probably something like isolation by default but optional (ie, allowing sharing). The current design means further protocols and de-facto standards are required to support, eg, streaming and screenshots. That is bad for an ecosystem that relies on low barriers to entry to get good software written.

Basically, there needed to be a security model but the developers skipped it because it seemed like it shouldn't be the compositor's job. And after a very painful couple of years, seems quite likely that it was the compositor's job.

>In hindsight; that was a design mistake. The correct design is probably something like isolation by default but optional (ie, allowing sharing).

I'm not really convinced it was. Frankly, Wayland does a great job handling the tasks I want my display server to handle. I don't have to wade into config files every time I plug in a new HID, or a new monitor, and my touch pad is a joy to use.

I think how screen sharing works is actually very dependent on the system in question ( I want a different set of prompts on my desktop from my laptop from my server), and that leaving that complexity out of the display server was a rough, but correct, decision.

That said, I'm with you - I held off on Wayland for a long time because screen sharing and screen recording just weren't there. At least for me, Pipewire is now a working solution. I won't go back to X.

You are probably only using Gnome and GTK3 applications. Everything else lags behind (because in Wayland you need to reinvent everything for each WM and toolkit). Everything is also incompatible because of all those reimplementations, so if you don't just stick to the one true Gnome way, it will be broken. If you just do what Fedora is designed for, I agree that it can be fine.

Well, I am using sway, and I have found that not true in my experience. Qt has also good support for Wayland and so do SDL-based apps. I don't use any GNOME native applications and I manage just fine.

It depends on your desktop environment and the applications, because the only compatible parts of Wayland are the dumbest "draw a rectangular window" and simplest input support (assuming your "WM" implemented the input right).

Essentially, what could depend on shared standards and implementations in X11, can't do so in Wayland, and there are two major forks when it comes to protocol extensions, as well as major fork between GNOME and everyone else on topic of Server-Side decorations.

I have to say the story on server side decorations is nasty and disappointing from the GNOME devs.

It's evolution of the stance that started in early GNOME 2.x time, and crystallised with GNOME 3. Similar to how GNOME 3.8 was used to push systemd one everyone, similar to how they tried to push their own idea about input methods on everyone (since I don't use IBus, I don't know if they finally succeeded - fortunately UIM and XIM still work).

"We know better" could be their motto.

And yet, they have built the most popular desktop environment for Linux. To me, GNOME (on Fedora) feels more polished and visually consistent than Windows 10, which is impressive considering the massive imbalance of resources between those two projects. Would that have been possible if they listened to the zealots online who complain if they don’t support every possible configuration under the sun? I don’t think so.

And yet, Microsoft has built the most popular desktop 'operating system'.

We've seen, again and again, that popularity has absolutely nothing to do with technical merit or even lack of overt user-hostility.

It's not about supporting every possible configuration under the sun. It's often about not supporting the bare minimum that would make it a good environment, based on "know better" from people who have no relevant experience.

The IBus case is classic example - There was high-handed declaration that having one single global IME state is "easier" for users. The problem is when you regularly have to use languages that are incompatible in writing systems and input methods. Whether its one of the CJK or switching between one of the cyrillic variants and latin, life is much easier when you can have separate input state between let's say an Instant Messenger and your IDE.

For me, I recall the "canary in the coal mine" was when they refused (despite earlier promises and roadmaps) to re-implement certain things related to printing, again in a way that probably didn't bother the developers.

A similar case involves all the very deep integration with systemd, where they essentially declared that there's one Operating System under the Sun and its name is Fedora.

And it might feel more polished than Windows 10 on surface, yes. But then it's much less capable and the resources in Windows go towards things like not breaking people's software and behaviours.

Being better than Windows 10 is a low bar to clear, and doing so doesn't make your software not shit.

Honestly, the current state of mainstream desktop environments -- open source or proprietary -- is pretty awful with the exception of perhaps KDE and little ones like XFCE and LXDE. It kind of makes me glad I didn't hop on the GNOME train in the late 90s -- I could see the awful coming even back then -- and just stuck with a bare WM.

I last tried Wayland on Ubuntu 19.10, but quickly went back to Xorg after discovering some issues trying to share my screen on Zoom. I don’t remember what the issues were specifically, but given that Xorg was working perfectly fine, it wasn’t something I was willing to spend much effort troubleshooting.

It sounds like screen sharing is a known problem area? Does anyone know if they have fixed these issues in later versions of Zoom or Ubuntu?

Screen sharing and recording are a pain point because the default security model of Wayland doesn't allow applications to see what other applications are rendering.

That said, Pipewire is a working solution for Zoom today on Wayland. I'm not on Ubuntu, so I don't know if the Chromium package they ship has Pipewire enabled by default, but my guess is that they do.

I use a small extension to automatically default Zoom to opening calls in the browser (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zoom-redirector/fm...) and there I can share screens just fine (Full desktop, application window only, etc - For the most part, things work fine).

I'd give it another 12 months if you don't want to have to think about it at all, but I'll be honest, Arch/Gnome/Wayland is the happiest I've EVER been on desktop linux.

This is really informative, thank you!