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KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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I did and quite frankly it's trash, XDG portals are a clunky and quite frankly terrible and poorly thought out api. I'm not the only one that disagrees with this sentiment as multiple people are trying to get protocols like
ext-screencopy-v1for screen recording andext-foreign-toplevel-*for window management upstreamed into wayland so that xdg portals aren't necessary for these use cases. I don't mind the reliance on pipewire too much, but I too think that It shouldn't be necessary for screen capture.IMO It is one of nate's worst takes of all time if not the worst. Usually I agree with most things he writes, but not this, xdg-portals is a travesty, pipewire is nice and all, but I don't see why we should need an entire media system for basic screen capture capabilities. and clearly im not alone on this sentiment
And that'll shake out in the time it takes for X11 to go away. I get what you're saying, although I don't share your opinion about portals from a user perspective: I'm just happy that Firefox finally uses the Plasma file picker.
I have a couple of issues with portals. One is that we're putting too much eggs in the basket of something that is designed for containers. XDG portals Have rejected features that people have requested because they don't want to expose that functionality to a container and they are allergic to permission prompts apparently.
I also have other issues with the portals for instance video capture. It requires you to have a camera portal. It requires you to have a desktop capture portal. It also requires you to have an app to app, video, portal, which doesn't exist yet. All of these things require pipewire pretty much in most cases, so why can't we just have a single pipewire portal? It may not scale well in the future, but it doesn't scale well now anyways. If you want just a generic pipe wire stream, you're not gonna be able to have it, you're going to have to conform to one of the standards anyways. For a case in point example, the OBS pull request for Game Scope Capture is the perfect example of this over reliance in XDG portals.
I'm showcasing this just to highlight the fact that the XDG portals are incredibly poorly thought out, and I don't think that it's a reliable method for the future going forwards.
PS. Please pardon any oddities in this, I had to use speech to text, since my RSI is acting up.
I think having separate standard APIs for screenshots, screen capture, and video capture that aren't married to one implementation makes sense.
I partially agree about the focus on containers/sandboxes. Yes, it makes sense to criticize that something designed for a different use case results in different trade-offs. But on the other hand, are the use cases really that different? We're talking about standalone desktop apps, they need some common building blocks no matter if they're containerized or not, right?
Otherwise I don't know enough about the standards to comment there, you're probably right!