Frog Protocols announced to try and speed up Wayland protocol development

I hope they succeed. Some of these protocols do take too long and way too many arguments on the correct way to do the same thing. Sometimes I get why, and sometimes I do think they should be more willing to just try things out and iterate.

Great news.

-Global hotkey support
-Copy-paste between wayland and xwayland that doesn't break
-Drag and drop between applications is finnicky and not always working
-Window management with positions, geometry etc are lacking features.

Just to name some. Hopefully things get better faster.
And lots of people use Wayland just fine already. It depends on the needs i guess.


Last edited by Xpander on 24 September 2024 at 9:18 am UTC

Well, I like my protocols cute and green, so this is good news.

Quoting: Xpander-Global hotkey support
-Copy-paste between wayland and xwayland that doesn't break
-Drag and drop between applications is finnicky and not always working
-Window management with positions, geometry etc are lacking features.

I was thinking I'm the only one experiencing those. Especially drag and drop and copy and paste is one of the things not working reliably. Sometimes drag and drop even freezes the application and I have to kill it. It's hard to know wether it's an application specific problem a Wayland protocol implementation problem (I'm using Plasma) or a problem from the protocol itself.
All I know is, those things worked reliably on X11 and they don't work reliably now.

On my gaming system I don't encounter those problems, but while working I encounter them almost on a daily basis.

Due to scaling working way better on Plasma Wayland than Plasma X11 I kind of have to live with these problems.

Note that Simon Ser, maintainer for Wlroots, has helped maintain the wlr protocols for several years now back when Wlroots was ahead of the curve in terms of Wayland functionality. He's been bringing in protocols from wlr to upstream wayland protocols for a few years now.

KDE also maintains its own bespoke protocols and implemented some of the wlr unstable protocols.

I'm not sure how Frog Protocols is any different except in the way it's presented as protocols anyone can implement. In practice wlr protocols can be implemented by other compositors and KDE did implement them.

(from my perspective as a bystander)

Edit: clicking through some of the links, I can see the value in it. Individual compositor protocols are different than protocols intended for adoption in every compositor. The w-p repository really needs a kick in the ass. I can only hope Frog Protocols will provide that.

Or, as Xaver Hugl puts it:

Quoteone of the big reasons in MRs that have an (at least initially) active author is unresolved discussions about often theoretical issues, while at the same time some real world problems get missed. By experimenting in the real world before committing to a "stable" protocol, a lot of those problems can be avoided.

Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 24 September 2024 at 10:04 am UTC

According to the replies to that announcement work is underway to package this for various distros.

Valve-associated people having to once again fix FreeDesktop's terrible development.

If there is anyone who understands testing and rapid iteration, it's Valve. 100% on board with this, but then again I am an end user, not a developer. I also don't like the tendency to say "Xorg is dead" but also "Why do you need [thing only Xorg can do]? We're not working on that." cause while I'm not Xorg fan, understand why it's deprecated, and really appreciate a lot of what Wayland is doing, when a user says "Hey, I need this because ____" the answer is never supposed to be "Well tough shit then." but I've seen Wayland development have that mindset at times.

Frankly, the amount of time it takes the Wayland project developers to agree on certain things is ridiculous (why do we not have application Multi-Window management yet last I checked? That's a really basic thing.) and I'm pretty much in agreement with the things Xpander touched on in this comments section.


Last edited by WMan22 on 24 September 2024 at 7:02 pm UTC

It sure took a long time to get the patches that allowed users to disable vsync on Wayland. This idea really sounds great.

My plan is to start using Wayland when X11 is no longer available for my distro. I see no hurry to switch.

At the rate they keep messing with and changing stuff for Wayland, we could have had X11 fixed up by now and modernized.. 🙄


Last edited by reaperx7 on 25 September 2024 at 12:18 am UTC

There's now a MR for Mesa to become a member of Wayland Protocols: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/338

One of the points of contention was that many parties felt like outsiders to the Wayland Protocols org. Simon Ser and other members seem to be working to correct that.

Quoting: reaperx7At the rate they keep messing with and changing stuff for Wayland, we could have had X11 fixed up by now and modernized.. 🙄

Absolutely not, because nobody wants to touch X11 with a tem foot pole. Wayland was started by X11 developers because they were sick of it after all.

Quoting: Mountain ManMy plan is to start using Wayland when X11 is no longer available for my distro. I see no hurry to switch.

I might be working like that, except I use Mint, which is pretty old fashioned. Probably when Mint is ready to make Wayland the default (but still retain X11 as an option) is around the time lots of other distros will no longer make X11 available at all . . .

Quoting: XpanderGreat news.

-Global hotkey support
-Copy-paste between wayland and xwayland that doesn't break
-Drag and drop between applications is finnicky and not always working
-Window management with positions, geometry etc are lacking features.

Just to name some. Hopefully things get better faster.
And lots of people use Wayland just fine already. It depends on the needs i guess.

isnt global hotkey also up to the program? like OBS has to implement it

btw OBS. recording is kinda blurry at higher resolution. i read there is an issue with scaling other than 100%. i have not tried it, because i would not use it that way anyway, when it works just fine on x11

wayland still has a long way to go

Quoting: mylkaisnt global hotkey also up to the program? like OBS has to implement it

AFAIK KDE has support for it and GNOME doesn't yet, maybe GNOME 48, and no production client applications use it

Quoting: WMan22I also don't like the tendency to say "Xorg is dead" [...] while I'm not Xorg fan, understand why it's deprecated, and really appreciate a lot of what Wayland is doing

As a regular use, I'm almost scratching my head coming up with a list of things I can do in X that I can't do in Wayland.

WayPipe allows streaming applications over SSH.

Maybe some Server Client Stuff to mimic X2Go and X forewarding or whatever it's called.

And maybe some clipboard stuff like noted in the article linking up Wayland and XWayland clipboards.

Nothing really jumps out at me.

Maybe I can't do stuff when applications need to play catchup like WINE just isn't able to scale applications (StarCraft 1) on Wayland like 800p up to 3840p or Krita waiting on v6.0 and Qt6 for Wayland support.

I don't come up with a whole lot, and efforts like this to close the gaps are more than welcome, Valve has done a tremendous job getting the (linux) "ship" upgraded and optimized.

Quoting: ElectricPrism

Quoting: WMan22I also don't like the tendency to say "Xorg is dead" [...] while I'm not Xorg fan, understand why it's deprecated, and really appreciate a lot of what Wayland is doing

As a regular use, I'm almost scratching my head coming up with a list of things I can do in X that I can't do in Wayland.

Maybe I can't do stuff when applications need to play catchup like WINE just isn't able to scale applications (StarCraft 1) on Wayland like 800p up to 3840p or Krita waiting on v6.0 and Qt6 for Wayland support.

For me, the big deal is applications not having a Wayland version. It matters a lot for me because I use multiple monitors, and XWayland applications are a no-go.

GNOME 47 recently adopted XWayland Native Scaling as an experimental option, but it doesn't work...at all...for Lightworks. So my choices are a broken window or a blurry window on Wayland with fractional scaling, regardless of desktop.

All my Wine games are also blurry. Steam is blurry. Audacity is blurry (but Audacity 4.0 may not be!). Signal Desktop can be blurry or partially broken.

Wine might have a stable Wayland version next year, so that takes care of a lot of blurriness, and Lightworks will get there eventually.

Don't get me wrong, the ability to actually use my monitors on Linux is only possible with Wayland, but it'd be nice for every application to have a functioning Wayland version. So I guess this isn't technically "something I can do in X that I can't in Wayland"...

Session management is a big one that might be finalised next year, mayyybe. Color management is something that nominally works on X that doesn't really on Wayland yet, but it's close to being merged. I need it this week for a photoshoot though, so I guess I'll use my Mac for that...

Then there are multi-window applications which are sort of tied in with session management.

And as mentioned, there are fifo/commit-timing which is preventing SDL from defaulting to Wayland.

But Wayland nominally works.

Quoting: ElectricPrism

Quoting: WMan22I also don't like the tendency to say "Xorg is dead" [...] while I'm not Xorg fan, understand why it's deprecated, and really appreciate a lot of what Wayland is doing

Nothing really jumps out at me.

Maybe I can't do stuff when applications need to play catchup like WINE just isn't able to scale applications (StarCraft 1) on Wayland like 800p up to 3840p or Krita waiting on v6.0 and Qt6 for Wayland support.

I don't come up with a whole lot, and efforts like this to close the gaps are more than welcome, Valve has done a tremendous job getting the (linux) "ship" upgraded and optimized.

Screen Readers, for one thing. I like to use Crow Translate for its OCR capabilities to sometimes get a sneak peek at some manga before it gets translated by someone, but Crow Translate is completely busted on Wayland, at least on my setup.

Additionally, while I'm not PERSONALLY visually impaired, I knew someone who was, and the lack of screen reader capabilities for Wayland in general is a gaping hole in accessibility features.

Additionally, I do not appear to be able to span a game across multiple monitors in full screen unless the game is running in windowed mode, locking me away from eyefinity-like gameplay on my main PC.