everything you could want and more already was dreamt up and has a PR for it, you can thank Gnome for stonewalling everything for half a decade or more
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
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Gnome the apple of the Linux world. It's their way or the high way.
i'm genuinely surprised this isn't more downvoted given the nature of this community. lol
What does Gnome dislike about the idea so much?
gnome-shell probably has its own proprietary way to do it. idk, I use Niri (which also does).
There's probably a PR or a thread somewhere with a bunch of very angry nerds fighting over whether this is even a useful feature and there’s no API because they can't reach a compromise. There is no design.
Gnome board members most likely blocking it while embezzling donations
Some design choices of Wayland are really weird.
That said do you know of the wlr foreign toplevel management protocol? A lot of the smaller compositors support it. But yes a lot like e.g. Mutter and I think kwin do not.
Best option right now are to use the following protocol extensions
https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-activation-v1 this extension covers your setting focus needs, but getting a list of other wayland clients is a bit trickier.
https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-foreign-toplevel-list-v1 this extension can list clients in theory, but its missing support for both gnome and kde.
Some of the unstable extensions have wide adoption, so perhaps take a look at each of them to see if they provide the functionality you want. Good luck!
Edit: was curious and did some more digging. KDE has their own protocol extension for this https://wayland.app/protocols/kde-plasma-window-management
As for gnome, I couldn’t find anything that seemed suitable, other than writing a gnome extension specifically to support this. I imagine that doesn’t fit within your vision for your project though.
Anyway, I had fun looking into this. Once again good luck!
Some wise people said that it was originally designed for car infotainment. Everything else is an addition.
Congratulations you have discovered the new hotness being forced upon Linux community (only 17 years in development and counting lol) isn't so hot.
My favourite quote from the linked article:
"Instead of providing a better way of doing something, common features are not supported at all, and instead it's the job of everyone else in the ecosystem to agree on a standard. That's not a stunning argument in favor of replacing something that already exists and that has already been standardized in X11!"
citation -
Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years
https://omar.yt/posts/wayland-set-the-linux-desktop-back-by-10-years
Yeah let's all go back to X it was so much better 🫠
I mean, it wasn't, but X11 also took like 20 years to get to where Xorg took over, and then Xorg has been puttering for another 15. Dunno what it is with Linux graphics that lends itself to such long development cycles. ...I mean I do know, it's some of the worst possible stacks that benefits the least from the bazaar approach.
Þis, but unironically
Forced by who exactly?
KDE, some distros.
A piece of software using another piece of software does not mean forcing anything on anyone.
Moreover, KDE runs on X11 and I don't know of any distribution which does not provide Xorg in their repositories.
KDE is dropping support for X11 next year: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/
So what?
Should they support X11 forever despite the fact that even the maintainers of X11 are barely maintaining X11?
Are they forcing you to do anything?
I'm not saying KDE should do one thing or another, I understand that maintaining code, even unchanging code as you claimed, takes effort.
Yes, they're going to force me to switch to Wayland on this machine. I'm on X because I need autokey, pyautogui, and TeamViewer. I need to look into alternatives and switch, except I don't have the option of replacing TeamViewer.
I'm not really partisan in the whole X vs Wayland jihad, I run Wayland on my 2 other machines and don't notice any difference.
and don’t notice any difference.
The tldr of why Wayland was adopted in the first place and the next hotness will also be forced upon us as well. Lol
I am not saying that software written in C is bad
after implying that code written in C is inherently insecure 🥴
We are only ten years behind thanks to gnome to be fair.
Just picture all the progress we could have made!
I think Wayland deserves some blame for taking the hard line on security. Every other security policy software lets you move the slider between max security or no security at all. But not Wayland, mommy knows best. Honestly, Wayland and Gnome deserver each other, both projects have the same insufferable approach where they think their users are idiots.
I would imagine part of this is because multi seat (or cursor) wayland is just as important as single seat wayland.
I just made the spicy decision to implement hyprland IPC in my window manager...
IIRC Wayland is only a spec, compositora are the implementation. I believe Wayland has a reference competitor, maybe target that?