The discussion about "wayland vs X11" is eerily reminiscent of the discussion of "systemd vs. sysv-init"...

Some people apparently really do hate it when things change that they seemingly have no control over

Edit: I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion for this post :-D

Yeah, I'm a big fan of systemd but I can accept that when it first came out it was probably a lot worse than it is today. Similarly, Wayland has a bunch of good ideas, along with a bunch of functionality that isn't there yet. Of course, Wayland also has the problem that it's intentionally excluding some useful features that X had, like global hotkeys and screensharing. I think systemd and Wayland are actually opposites in this regard, where systemd was disliked at first and then turned liked, while Wayland was liked at first but is now turning to disliked

> Of course, Wayland also has the problem that it's intentionally excluding some useful features that X had, like global hotkeys and screensharing

Screensharing has been supported for some time already. Some apps support it, some don't. It is up to the apps to use the respective APIs, the times of free reign over framebuffer is over.

I mean, you can get screen sharing to work. But there are like 3 different incompatible "standards" for how to do it. There's no single simple answer to "how to record the screen in Wayland". This has been the state of screen sharing on Wayland for at least 7 years.

I'm also very curious about what's envisioned for global hotkeys. Surely we don't expect people to manually go to their system settings and configure some command to run which talks to Discord over an IPC solution to start sharing my voice when I press my push to talk button and stop when I release the push to talk button? But "global hotkeys should be configured on a system basis, not an application basis" seems to be the reigning philosophy, despite being incredibly user and developer hostile.

There is one standard and single simple answer: xdg-desktop-portal with pipewire. Some compositors might have implemented their own private APIs, but that is not a standard by definition.

Global shortcuts are a bit more thorny, exactly for the reason you mentioned. You present one POV, the another is, that application-defined shortcuts are incredibly hostile, as they allow application to stomp on each other in the better case, or hijaack global state in the worse one. Some other operating systems do not allow it either, for the same reasons. The long-term solution could be defining api, that allows application to advertise global actions, and allow the user to configure shortcuts that might (or might not) call these, in some user-friendly way.

> A portal frontend service for Flatpak and possibly other desktop containment frameworks.

When it comes to global shortcuts, I'm not saying it has a super easy solution, but it's something that it's essential to support. Wayland intentionally doesn't, and I can't see that changing in the short term (as you also agree)