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Comment by mindcrash

> The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another.

Because both have their own portal implementation/compositor with their own issues and service spec implementations. KDE has xdg-desktop-portal-kde, and GNOME has xdg-desktop-portal-gnome. On top of that each (still) has their own display server; KDE has KWin, and GNOME has Mutter.

> The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver.

Weston is probably good for two things: Running things in Kiosk mode and showcasing how to build a compositor.

That's why you should at least use xdg-desktop-portal if you are not running KDE or GNOME. But this is a vanilla compositor (without implementations of any freedesktop desktop protocols), and as-is has no knowledge of things like screenshots or screensharing.

If you run any wlroots based compositor except Hyprland you should run xdg-desktop-portal-wlr which does implement the desktop protocols org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Screenshot and org.freedesktop.impl.portal.ScreenCast.

If you use Hyprland you should run its fork xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland instead which additionaly has things like file picking built in. Additionally you can/should run xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and/or xdg-desktop-portal-kde to respectively get GTK ("GNOME") and QT ("KDE") specific implementations for desktop protocols. And you absolutely should use xdg-desktop-portal-gtk instead of xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, because xdg-desktop-portal-gnome really doesn't like to share with others.

> With Wayland the each desktop is reinventing the wheel

Not really true, as I mentioned earlier there's still a DE specific display server running in the background (like Mutter and KWin-X11 for X11), and graphics in each compositor is driven directly by the graphics driver in the kernel (through KMS/DRM).

In fact, on paper and in theory, the architecture looks really good: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html. However, in practice, some pretty big chunks of functionality on the protocol level is missing but the freedesktop contributors, and the GNOME and KDE teams will get there eventually.

parent mindcrash 10 months ago

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