> These seem to be intentional design decisions (marketed as being necessary for security, but really being power-user hostile)
That's an unnecessarily abrasive view: the Wayland protocol designers do not hate power users. But allowing programs to constantly take in arbitrary input & output information in the background, as well as simulate arbitrary input to other programs, is an obvious and glaring security flaw. Unfortunately, that forbids general-purpose screenshotting and key-rebinding programs - but there is no sensible middle ground.
>Wayland is designed with the thought that users download random applications from the interwebz which are not trustworthy and run them.
I appreciate that the average HN poster, and to a lesser extent the average Linux user, does not do this - but many, many Windows users do. In order to actually break into a mass desktop market, there has to be consideration of the ways people who do not currently use Linux behave.
I would even argue that lots of current Linux users are guilty of this - how many Arch users are checking the contents of PKGBUILDs from the AUR? How many Linux users, when searching for the solution to some problem with their desktop, have blindly copy-pasted commands from some support post - or worse still, just downloaded a "fix it" script to run?
Wayland is built on sane assumptions, because it also aims to cater to a not-insignificant part of the desktop market. That the response of an X11 supporter is "simply run the correct programs" show how little they have understood the goals and successes of Wayland as a project. It is not X12, and some of us are grateful for that.
> That's an unnecessarily abrasive view: the Wayland protocol designers do not hate power users. But allowing programs to constantly take in arbitrary input & output information in the background, as well as simulate arbitrary input to other programs, is an obvious and glaring security flaw. Unfortunately, that forbids general-purpose screenshotting and key-rebinding programs - but there is no sensible middle ground.
Of course there's a middle ground: require special permission for programs that wish to do those things. For example, macOS has permission prompts for "[Application] would like to record this computer's screen." and "[Application] would like to control this computer using accessibility features."