Meddling with Wayland (Sway) again.

• Pointer barriers don’t work. Each compositor has to implement this feature on its own. Sway doesn’t.
  
• My multipass won’t work anymore. Has to be implemented in the compositor. I use this almost daily.
  
• Couldn’t find a way (yet) to set the “app ID” from GTK3. When running a GTK3 program under Wayland, wmclass and wmname are simply ignored. This means I cannot write assign rules for my terminal at the moment. Would have to switch to another terminal (or port to GTK4?).
  
• No shared clipboard between XWayland programs (of which there are a lot) and Wayland.
  
• redshift. Each compositor has to implement this on its own.
  

In general, the old model of “programs that work together” is gone on Wayland because of security reasons. I can understand the reasoning behind this. Downside is that each compositor has to implement everything and the kitchen sink now. (If I were to write my own Wayland compositor, it would be an unbelievably huge amount of work.) I’m not convinced that this is a good model. The Sway guys are duplicating all the efforts of the GNOME guys and the KDE guys (and that’s basically it, because all the other compositors are toys – because it’s so much harder to write a compositor than an X11 window manager, only larger projects can afford that).

I’m trying to stay positive and optimistic. But it’s hard. Wayland does not have a “killer feature”, at least none that I can see. Why would I want to switch?

This situation reminds me of switching from Windows to Linux. For a long time, I was complaining that Linux couldn’t do this or that, so I staid on Windows. Eventually, I saw the advantages of using Linux, so switching became much easier and I was willing to make sacrifices. Same thing when I switched my servers from Linux to OpenBSD. With Wayland, I haven’t reached this point yet. All I see is obstacles and disadvantages.

I’ll keep looking for reasons to switch to Wayland … As soon as I find a good reason, it’ll be fine.

My favorite quote on this topic by Benno Rice: https://movq.de/v/06189654e5/benno-rice-change.ogg