I was researching the issue and noticed wlr-screencapture. I was hoping to see it at https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols too, but no luck. Thanks for the lead on xfg-desktop-portal.

It is fascinating watching the near decade-long journey as Wayland tackles screenshots.

Whats fascinating to me is that I had NO idea there was some battle of some sorts in the "screenshot biosphere"

TBH I use GreenShot exclusively as it is seamless and does every thing I Need [0]

[0] https://i.imgur.com/x0oMzb6.png

And I can do things like this

[1] https://i.imgur.com/ZtR60qw.png

Nested fucking screenshots.

All I have to do is hit prtscrn each iteration I want to capture

There's a battle over basically everything beyond drawing basic windows in the Wayland sphere, with the parties' attitudes about as follows:

- Wayland team: "Out of scope, lol" (security, keeping it as generic as possible)

- Gnome: "Works for us" (dbus APIs specific to Gnome")

- wlroots: Developing extensions to the Wayland protocol and attempting to get them into Wayland proper and adopted by others

- KDE: Mostly going the KDE way where it makes sense, but open to wlr persuasion (they will implement layer-shell, but keep their own ways for some other things)

- Freedesktop group (I'm the least familiar with this one): Promoting some stuff meant for Flatpak, but not really showing much initiative beyond that

This fragmentation is one of the reasons Wayland adoption is slow. Users expect things to work across desktops as they used to on X and developers aren't always clear about compatibility either. Many people seem to think that Wayland is just another display server (it's not, it's a protocol!) with all of the old functionality and are frustrated when they find out it is not.

The fragmentation will probably exist for quite a while. Pipewire will probably take over the screen sharing space and KDE and wlroots will share more protocols (Gnome gonna Gnome, of course), but there are just many things that are compositor family- or even compositor specific, like an xkill-equivalent, which I still miss dearly.

By fascinating you mean depressing, right? If Wayland has taken this long to get a basic feature like screenshots what other features does it not support?

A lot of things. The main thing to realize is that the Wayland team doesn't really care about much other than putting windows into compositors.

Wayland doesn't actually support screenshots, it's all extensions.