I collected some mastodon links so you know roughly what to look for:

• here’s a game developer unable to do window positioning, multi-monitor, display type detection, hi-DPI… in portable ways on Wayland. window positioning in particular bites game developers hard, and is still unfixed for, gonna be honest, horseshit security reasons.
• this entire thread is kind of an excellent summary
• screen recording on Wayland sucks, and what’s interesting about that thread is the smug person replying gets it (to my memory) wrong, portals for screen recording are a hack
• in fact here’s the post where Ariadne told me I was wrong about portals; it’s also a good starting point if you want to see what protocol discussions look like
• here’s one of the jwz threads out of many

in conclusion: how dare I. don’t I know these are just poor, mostly corporate-backed volunteers

this is exactly how I look

yes I transform into a car

for Wayland, the issue is unfortunately outside of the core protocol. the core protocol doesn’t implement everything you need for a functional desktop, and some of the omissions are utterly obvious things. the ecosystem makes up for that with protocol extensions, but some (all?) of the important ones are proprietary to a particular compositor and considered part of its internal API. also, because Wayland has a frankly pretty broken security model (everything is utterly locked down and as far as I can tell no exceptions are possible via permission modals or any other mechanism), some types of applications are only possible via fragile hacks. gnome has many of these proprietary protocols because Wayland is essentially under the same umbrella and so it has a privileged position; KDE is in a close second. every other compositor has severely reduced functionality.

for more details, see jwz’s recent blog posts where he failed to port xscreensaver to Wayland because some of the utterly basic functionality he needed was compositor-specific. the hyprland wiki’s compatibility page is also relevant because all of those problems tend to be rooted in this too, though I of course don’t recommend trusting them as a source. Asahi Linux also has a ton of issues on their github around hyprland that I believe boil down to protocol issues. unfortunately these issues tend to be hidden from public view because they’re spread out across a hundred rants and a hundred discussions in FreeDesktop’s Wayland protocol committee; a properly formatted Mastodon search might also be informative.

(counting down the seconds until some Wayland dev wanders in and tells me I’m completely wrong about everything because an uncharitable reading of one of the paragraphs above reveals I’m wrong about some minor point and besides what am I saying, everyone should be on xlibre? toxic little fucks)

“As a Nixos user myself”: god it makes so much sense that you went from being a NixOS user who loves anduril to spamming up this thread defending DHH. posting his blog here semi-critically won’t save your posts by the way

ahaha yeah linking DHH’s fash shit here sure showed us

vice signal somewhere else dickheads

yep! unfortunately we’re fucked if they succeed, and the fascists and those funding them don’t particularly care if the resulting ecosystem is broken nonsense.

ooh finally I’ve got a second podcast to listen to other than BtB

mild booing noises for the guy comparing generative AI with fanfiction, but otherwise this is a statement I wish lots of other companies would make (seriously, coming out strongly against AI and comparing it with NFTs is free PR, how in fuck is this not a common thing?)

third bongrip oh shit im the couch

for them it’s absolutely about gatekeeping and control. keyboard interfaces can be cozy, easy to learn, and accessible — that’s what I aim for on my own computer, but I’ve never released the config because I know I’ve got a long way to go for all 3 (and I need to find a better base distro than NixOS).

hyprland is a fucking terrible keyboard interface. here’s the example config file you’re meant to edit before first launch (good luck if you can’t use a non-graphical editor for accessibility reasons I guess). it’s an awful little inflexible domain-specific language (oh joy, back to the pre-xmonad days where everything complex is a shitty hack), most of the file is dedicated to defining a bunch of shitty animations and graphics, and the keybinding system — the point of a keyboard interface — is threadbare. this is designed by someone who cares very much about how their interface looks in a screenshot and not at all about how it feels to use.

and all of the above is on purpose; if you can’t handle the intentionally regressive shittiness of hyprland, they want you to think it’s a skill issue. we know from the receipts that if you ask any of their core community for help, they’ll call you a slur. but even prospective hyprland lovers can’t stand this early-2000s compiz-brained shit, and that’s why they’re all very excited for omarchy, which is just arch linux bundled with DHH’s hyprland config that you can’t change.

the developers of interfaces like hyprland claim to give you more control over your own computer, but hyprland does that very poorly compared with almost any other modern keyboard interface. the actual control they care about is over the ecosystem. hyprland is one of your only choices for a keyboard interface on Wayland; otherwise, you’re stuck with gnome or KDE or something unmaintained (e: I guess there’s sway? none of these options entice me to be honest) that doesn’t work with any applications cause Wayland is a goddamn mess. that’s a position of power in an isolated subculture, and fascists fucking love that.

the hyprland developers were notoriously kicked out of contributing to FreeDesktop for being too toxic and disrupting the Wayland protocol design process (and I can’t imagine how toxic and disruptive you’d have to be to get kicked out of FreeDesktop of all orgs), and their push for popularity and the appearance of having distro support might be an effort to regain control there. Wayland protocols are an almost ideal way to create intentional incompatibilities and network effects. see also xlibre, which is building a weird fucked up ecosystem around itself even though it’s broken and pointless.

oh yeah totally, open transphobia and fascism is just as bad as being

known for being a tankie with biases of his own

the fuck is wrong with you. this is what centrism does to a motherfucker.

(and for the record, devault’s firmly wedged in my brain as a particularly dramatic neoliberal with a checkered past, but the fucker brings receipts (yes this is the same link in the OP that our guest decided to complain about, go read it because it’s fucking damning))

you’ve seen it from me as “the most toxic part of the Wayland ecosystem, and that’s saying something”

Counterpoint

ew

these are literally least intrusive ads possible and Firefox gets a few pennies from me leaving it active so that I can enjoy the product for free

mozilla has alienated a large number of its supporters by going all-in on LLM horseshit in their browser and anywhere else (MDN) they can shove it, exploitative crap (especially directed inwards towards its own developers, go find some ex-Mozilla postmorts if you want to see some of the nicest people you know get curbstomped by awful management and then fired), and doing a ton of other semi-to-fully fraudulent nonprofit boondoggle shit. they’ve made it clear they don’t want our donations (and plenty of people were donating more than just a few pennies from ads) and they really don’t deserve your advocacy. all Mozilla as a company cares about is the funding they get from Google. everything else is just layered affinity grifts.

Q&A!

what browser do you recommend then

none. we fucked it. once Mozilla dies, and they will die, none of the Gecko forks are realistically in shape to take on browser development on their own. chromium will be the only game in town, and google will use their dominant position to push through crap like browser attestation to secure their deathgrip on the web. ladybird is unserious fascist shit. chromium forks solve nothing. everything else is targeting an early 2000s version of the web’s features, which is good for them.

the only way I can see out of the above is Servo, the ex-Mozilla browser engine that Mozilla did their best to bury after Firefox Quantum, and they’re starved for cash and developers. I’d love if Servo was a workable browser today, but it just isn’t. it’ll take a lot more than a couple of pennies in some grifter’s pocket and the laziest possible advocacy to get it there.

I suspect people that downvoted me above assume I am shilling some commercial browser and just don’t know what LW is

lol no

this thread has broken containment, and the median quality of the discussion has dropped to the point where some rando decided to start a subthread about how it’s not ok to celebrate hitler’s death and also two regulars had an extremely heated fight about who was the most not-mad about the word chat as a noun/pronoun/whatever in English of all fucking things so uhhhh that’s all folks

yeah, it’s weird how many of our visitors came here thinking TechTakes is a news sub

you’re right, I even had Ellis’ Wikipedia page open to re-confirm the allegations but my fingers wanted it to be Gaiman for whatever reason

haha nah time for you to fucking leave

no fucking thanks