Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases.
There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed.
On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).
Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers.
I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".
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OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?
As an aside, you talk about wayland as if it were one thing. But the wayland protocol is intentionally minimal. Each wayland compositor picks and chooses between different third party libs to support various features. So you never know if something will actually work on the wayland compositor you use. If you stick within your ecosystem, yes, but it's not unified like X11 linux is. It's very fragmented and one's personal experience definitely doesn't say anything about other people's experience. Unlike with X11 where everyone uses the same thing.
For example, mouse and keyboard support and libei, libinput, or nothing (looking at you, weston). You never know what you're going to get and so applications that need to do basic keyboard/mouse things have to guess. It doesn't work all the time. In X11 it does.
Another example, accessibility features. The only wayland compositor that supports screen reading is GNOME's. They invented two new protocols, incompatible with all existing linux accessibility libraries. Only GNOME's wayland compositor and userspace applications use them.
So, in summary: one's experience can't be extrapolated with wayland because there is no single wayland.
It makes sense for something like accessibility to be part of the protocol because it almost always needs access to stuff that Wayland restricts by design.
It's been almost two decades and we're still taking steps backwards on accessibility and features because of Wayland.
From day 0 Wayland put their idea of a beautiful design above the needs of users. It's hard to see how we can claim to be inclusive when even our most basic decisions are hostile to large groups of users.
I never thought I would say this, but after 30 years of open source and Linux I don't see much of a bright future. Everyone I know from the community back then has moved on to using a Mac because of these issues.
But the Mac compositor (Quartz) implements the same permission model as Wayland, that's why you get a popup requesting permissions to share screen etc.
This particular case is about accessibility not permissions. AFAIK accessibility still isn't completely supported in major Wayland compositors so it's a legitimate complaint.
Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases.
There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed.
On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).
Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers.
I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".
---
OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?
As an aside, you talk about wayland as if it were one thing. But the wayland protocol is intentionally minimal. Each wayland compositor picks and chooses between different third party libs to support various features. So you never know if something will actually work on the wayland compositor you use. If you stick within your ecosystem, yes, but it's not unified like X11 linux is. It's very fragmented and one's personal experience definitely doesn't say anything about other people's experience. Unlike with X11 where everyone uses the same thing.
For example, mouse and keyboard support and libei, libinput, or nothing (looking at you, weston). You never know what you're going to get and so applications that need to do basic keyboard/mouse things have to guess. It doesn't work all the time. In X11 it does.
Another example, accessibility features. The only wayland compositor that supports screen reading is GNOME's. They invented two new protocols, incompatible with all existing linux accessibility libraries. Only GNOME's wayland compositor and userspace applications use them.
So, in summary: one's experience can't be extrapolated with wayland because there is no single wayland.
It makes sense for something like accessibility to be part of the protocol because it almost always needs access to stuff that Wayland restricts by design.
Again.
<expletive> ANY Linux project that strongly breaks backwards compatibility.
Not surprised that it's still messing with people even this late in the game.
No one is forcing anyone to use Wayland. There's DEs that use X11 and have no plans to move to Wayland.
Also no one is preventing this app from working, for whatever reasons the devs just haven't got it working.
Open source software is about freedom. Freedom to say fuck backwards compatibility or freedom to use X11 for the next 100 years.
Also the freedom for the X11 devs to say they don't want to maintain it anymore...
sounds like some peeps could contribute code to fix wayland / compositors to enable talon's accessibility hooks :D
It's been almost two decades and we're still taking steps backwards on accessibility and features because of Wayland.
From day 0 Wayland put their idea of a beautiful design above the needs of users. It's hard to see how we can claim to be inclusive when even our most basic decisions are hostile to large groups of users.
I never thought I would say this, but after 30 years of open source and Linux I don't see much of a bright future. Everyone I know from the community back then has moved on to using a Mac because of these issues.
Absurd ideas like "applications shouldn't be able to spy on or manipulate each other without explicit permission from the user".
But the Mac compositor (Quartz) implements the same permission model as Wayland, that's why you get a popup requesting permissions to share screen etc.
This particular case is about accessibility not permissions. AFAIK accessibility still isn't completely supported in major Wayland compositors so it's a legitimate complaint.