> I don't get the frustration with wayland (the protocol) in the comments.
They took a firm principled stance against screenshots to start with, which set them up for the COVID WFH wave. Then we've got this questionable design that seems hard to make accessible since accessibility is a security risk and we're heading right into Agentic AI which will be interesting. I've been avoiding the Wayland ecosystem for as long as I can after the initial burn and it'll be curious to see how well it supports bringing in new AI tooling. Maybe quite well, I gather that Pipewire is taking over the parts of the ecosystem that Wayland left for someone else and maybe the community has grown to the point where it has overcome the poor design of Wayland's security model by routing around it.
My guess is the frustration is coming from a similar perspective because it is a bit scary seeing Wayland getting picked up everywhere as a default and the evidence to date is they don't really consider a user-friendly system as a core design outcome. Realistically Wayland is 2 steps forward even if there is a step back here or there. The OSS world has never been defined by a clean and well designed graphics stack.
I think wayland is OK as a user. But Wayland is just not really that UNIX.
As ordinary user, I actually don't care about any of this. However, from another perspective, I think this is a bad thing—open source projects have become product-centered, defaulting to the assumption that users are ignorant fools. This isn't how community projects should behave, but those projects is not that community-driven anyway.
After all, for a long time, so-called security has only been a misused justification—never letting users make mistakes is just a pretty excuse, meant to keep users from being able to easily access something, and eventually from ever accessing it at all.
> Then we've got this questionable design that seems hard to make accessible
I'm not a fan of ADA ambulance chasers on principle, but I wouldn't shed a tear see them be able to go after the bigcos that made this mess (e.g. IBM).
ADA seems like bullshit until something happens that costs you sight, hearing, manual dexterity, etc. Then it is significantly less funny overall, I assure you.
This was not my experience. For example, it want until chromium 110 that you could use webrtc+pipewire without overriding settings, in 2023. So maybe in a strict sense you could do it with fiddling, I don't think you could install any Linux flavor and screen share over meet reliably.
We went through this during COVID. There were a lot of things that were supposedly technically achievable if you spent enough time setting it up right.
What really happened was most people gave up and either tried to avoid screen sharing or switched distributions.
They took a firm principled stance against screenshots to start with, which set them up for the COVID WFH wave. Then we've got this questionable design that seems hard to make accessible since accessibility is a security risk and we're heading right into Agentic AI which will be interesting. I've been avoiding the Wayland ecosystem for as long as I can after the initial burn and it'll be curious to see how well it supports bringing in new AI tooling. Maybe quite well, I gather that Pipewire is taking over the parts of the ecosystem that Wayland left for someone else and maybe the community has grown to the point where it has overcome the poor design of Wayland's security model by routing around it.
My guess is the frustration is coming from a similar perspective because it is a bit scary seeing Wayland getting picked up everywhere as a default and the evidence to date is they don't really consider a user-friendly system as a core design outcome. Realistically Wayland is 2 steps forward even if there is a step back here or there. The OSS world has never been defined by a clean and well designed graphics stack.