At this point, take all the lessons of wayland, plan everything in advance rather than incrementally deciding basic things like screenshotting and then build something new, superseding wayland so that power users like me and app developers will stop clinging to X. Right now I have no confidence in wayland and I know I'm not alone.
It is 18 years old (started in 2008 IIRC) and just now approaching something usable. So on the one hand it is a really old project whose original design considerations became obsolete a decade ago - I remember people were very bothered by the performance loss of needing several process switches with the X11 damage model in order to push an update to the screen, but on today's multi-core hardware that is basically free and everyone is using browser engines and writing their GUI in javascript anyway. But on the other, do you really want to spend another 10-20 years rewriting the Linux GUI stack from scratch only to reimplement "Wayland with best established extensions"?
It's biggest hurdle is having to explain even to tech people on HN that it's actually a good idea to have a UI where a user can approve a screen sharing request. You'd think for folks that claim to care about security that'd be a prime concern. It really is so weird how difficult that is for people to grasp. The implementation is likewise not complicated. Seriously how hard is it to draw a box selector and show an okay / cancel box.
It's because people got used to using screen share in X11 when they really want remote login. You cannot do remote login if there has to be someone sitting at the PC to approve it. Since Wayland has no remote login model, people are left trying to kludge together something out of screen sharing. I can guarantee the moment login over RDP becomes available everyone complaining about the screen sharing will quiet down. And yes, I know this is "not Wayland's concern". Kicking the ball does not fix the problem of "if I switch to Wayland I cannot login remotely". There needs to be a parent project which IS concerned with all the use-cases people require to function for a full working desktop experience. Otherwise you get left with this fragmentation, which isn't good for anyone. Basic OS services being fragmented between implementations really sucks. Microsoft figured this out 30 years ago.
Ya'll are exhausting. Wayland is the one thing where nerds on the internet will not even bother grabbing a livecd of a linux distro just to try it out and then complain about things that have been implemented for years.
Okay so I STILL have to log in locally before I can log in remotely. Also the list of known issues is pretty concerning. This is in not even close to a remote login solution. You are not accomplishing anything by pretending Wayland is anything more than a half-baked toy at present.
It's actually far superior. X11 only provides frames of the display so you can't do h.264 encoding on RDP streams. With Wayland the compositor provides a stream of the window whether it's video or a game. The RDP protocol encodes it in h264 and you get much lower latency and frame loss. X11 can forward a socket but you get no clipboard, no audio, nothing except key strokes and frames. It's not encrypted. Doesn't scale. Have to use SSH tunneling. And good luck having any influence on what the physical displays are showing. You can only do a virtual display or a physical one but not both.
This RDP implementation has clipboard sharing and audio integration. It spawns in a user session but it actually locks the real screens and creates a virtual display. You can make as many virtual displays as you want. In theory you can attach to a single window or rectangular area of the screen. Also it works perfectly fine with SDDM Autologin so you can spawn a display on your server and just auto unlock it.
The project is actually awesome. It's a holistic and far superior RDP solution to anything in the Linux space before.
If everyone appears to be missing something that's so easy to understand and implement, perhaps they're not missing it. They could have a different security/threat model than you're using. They could be expressing frustrations with being forced to manually approve something every time. They could be hitting dumb bugs in the implementation. There could be different people clamoring for more security and less intrusive security.
Honestly most people are just being lazy about it. You don't even need to prompt the user if you wanna allow everything by default. You just need to implement the screenshots, screensharing, and hot keys APIs. All 3 are super simple.
Then we also hit the question of who we're talking to/about. If you want to tell devs that they should implement a handful of general, simple APIs, that's probably fair. (Please start with the GNOME devs.) But some of us are just users explaining why Wayland doesn't work for us; even if we wanted, we can't fix it.
