The actual statement from the Gtk developer is worth quoting: I do not understand how, contrary to all the statements about standards and community and inclusion they tend to have, Gtk/Gnome...
The actual statement from the Gtk developer is worth quoting:
I don't feel like answering this point-by-point.
Accessibility-focused people tend to come with maximalist lists of demands ("We need to have all these very intrusive capabilities, or the system will not be accessible at all").
I do not understand how, contrary to all the statements about standards and community and inclusion they tend to have, Gtk/Gnome developers tend to be so toxic and demeaning.
I think you misunderstand their point. I won't claim to know what that particular developer meant by their comments, but the accessibility topic is very much a double edged blade. See this post by...
I think you misunderstand their point. I won't claim to know what that particular developer meant by their comments, but the accessibility topic is very much a double edged blade. See this post by EvilSkeleton, one of the Gnome devs putting in most of the accessibility work.
And the above comment by BuckyMcMonks really resonates with their frustration. There's no we in accessibility development. We are not putting in any of the work. We are only using what's given to us, and then complain that it's not complete.
Accessibility is a very important topic, and if you follow the development channels, there is actual work being done across the board. The thing is, there is a lot of work to do and not enough people to do it. Being more demanding or assuming bad faith is not the right way to go about this.
Wow... that post certainly furthers my point. Yes, there is actually work. As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, too, the situation with Talon does not seem so one-sided. But for some reason,...
See this post by EvilSkeleton, one of the Gnome devs putting in most of the accessibility work.
Wow... that post certainly furthers my point.
Yes, there is actually work. As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, too, the situation with Talon does not seem so one-sided. But for some reason, Gnome/Gtk devs, even when they are legitimately doing important, good work, seem insistent on taking a toxic, dismissive, demeaning tone toward everyone else. The tone of that post is simply not appropriate. The treatment of others is not appropriate. Whether or not the author is doing good work, they should really reconsider whether writing in such a way is constructive or at all respectful.
I use Gnome, and think it works quite well. I think the developers do good work. But whenever I have to read what they write, I tend to be dismayed that they seem so insistent on taking the tone that they do.
Have you read the post I linked? Gnome devs are constantly abused everywhere on the internet, at times simply for being a Gnome dev other times for their UI design philosophy. Read from section...
Have you read the post I linked?
Gnome devs are constantly abused everywhere on the internet, at times simply for being a Gnome dev other times for their UI design philosophy.
Read from section 3.3 in particular.
I fully expect everything I say in this article to be dismissed or be taken out of context on the basis of ad hominem, simply by the mere fact I’m a GNOME Foundation member / regular GNOME contributor. [...]
I can’t speak for other regular contributors, but I presume that they don’t feel comfortable talking about this because they dared be a GNOME contributor. At least, that’s how I felt for the longest time.
It’s so unfair and infuriating that all the work I do and share online gain very little activity compared to random posts and articles from privileged people without disabilities that rant about the Linux desktop’s accessibility being trash. It doesn’t help that I become severely anxious sharing accessibility-related work to avoid signs of virtue signalling.
We simultaneously need more interest from people with disabilities to contribute to free and open-source software, and the wider community to be significantly more intolerant of bullies who profit from smearing and demotivating people who are actively trying.
We should take inspiration from “Accessibility on Linux sucks, but GNOME and KDE are making progress” by OSNews. They acknowledge that accessibility on Linux is suboptimal while recognizing the efforts of GNOME and KDE. As a community, we should promote progress more often.
Yes? I don't disagree. But then they respond by describing "privileged people spending at most 5 minutes to write erroneous posts" (in reference to a Register article), saying things like or And,...
Have you read the post I linked?
Yes?
Gnome devs are constantly abused everywhere on the internet, at times simply for being a Gnome dev other times for their UI design philosophy.
I don't disagree. But then they respond by describing "privileged people spending at most 5 minutes to write erroneous posts" (in reference to a Register article), saying things like
I’m absolutely furious and disappointed in the Linux Desktop community for being quiet in regards to any kind of celebration to advancing accessibility, while proceeding to share content and cheer for random privileged people from big-name websites or social media who have literally put a negative amount of effort into advancing accessibility on Linux
or
If you’re the kind of person who stays quiet when we celebrate huge accessibility milestones, yet shares (or even makes) content that trash talks the people directly or indirectly contributing to the fucking software you use for free, you are the reason why accessibility on Linux is shit.
And, of course, as you quoted,
I fully expect everything I say in this article to be dismissed or be taken out of context on the basis of ad hominem, simply by the mere fact I’m a GNOME Foundation member / regular GNOME contributor.
Keep in mind that the framing reference of the post is a Mastodon discussion of a Register article where a GNOME developer has a dialogue with a Register author in response to an article about Xlibre that did make rather unwarranted claims about Wayland accessibility work, with the GNOME developer making comments like "Despite how many words you can print, its clear you can't actually understand any of it," and 'You write slop articles with no research, that sell VPN and "get more free ram" ads. Stop puffing your own farts.' What point am I supposed to take from this about "trash talking", and which people are doing it?
Again, I do not disagree with the GNOME developers here technically. And I do agree that they often get unwarranted criticism. But when someone chooses to write things like "stop puffing your own farts" (alatiera), "random privileged people" (TheEvilSkeleton), and "you are the reason why accessibility on Linux is shit" (TheEvilSkeleton), it seems incongruous to then complain about a "toxic environment", "nonconstructive criticism", and "ad hominem". Yes, they may be technically in the right, but that doesn't mean that their response to criticism, warranted or unwarranted, is appropriate or constructive, and they should understand that perhaps their reputation is influenced by their tone. I'd also suggest that perhaps, in responding to unwarranted criticism in that way, there is a risk of falling into a habit that results in responding to warranted criticism the same way.
I think there is, at least in the case of accessibility, a common goal of all the people in these discussions. Yet it feels like this sort of escalating tone and toxicity gets in the way.
Being a developer and face of a big open source project a lot of people depend on sadly comes with a lot of unwarranted hostility. GNOME is no exception there, but the project overall always has...
Being a developer and face of a big open source project a lot of people depend on sadly comes with a lot of unwarranted hostility. GNOME is no exception there, but the project overall always has stood out to me. It is one thing to be opinionated about UI and UX, it is a whole other thing to look like you are actively fighting large parts of your user base. This partially falls into that as far as I am concerned.
A obvious example was the introduction of GNOME 3 where it took years for basic features to be added back. Stuff like Minimize/Maximize buttons, no options for a visible taskbar of any kind, no icons on the desktop, no system tray, no power off button (unless you knew to use alt).
Even if I still think that people shouldn't be hostile towards OSS devs in general. I do understand why there might be more hostility aimed towards GNOME devs in general.
Having said that, I do feel that in this case you probably are reading a bit too much of the escalating tone in there. To be clear, I do think that @Barney is reading way too little of it in there either. The fact that they specifically work on accessibility shows they do care about the subject, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. Which I think also adds to their frustration about people saying it isn't enough. Which from both points is actually valid, they are trying to add the features but can't add them all at once but until those features are present it simply isn't enough for the people that need them.
What they do get wrong is being absolutely dismissive to people needing the features and not contributing. Which I think is a) likely wrong exemplified by people with disabilities in their own project and other places they use as examples b) unfair to users as GNOME and GTK explicitly are user facing products made to serve a very wide audience.
I think it's because accessiblity fundementally requires being able to arbitrarily inject itself literally anywhere a user would normally be able to intervene with standard hardware. That means...
I think it's because accessiblity fundementally requires being able to arbitrarily inject itself literally anywhere a user would normally be able to intervene with standard hardware.
That means virtual displays, virtual HIDs, and having access to metadata that you otherwise wouldn't want arbitrary stuff to access.
This is a rare article that I wish had a more clickbait title, like “Wayland Does Not Support Users with Accessible Input Needs,” in the hope that it would reach a larger audience. Relatedly,...
This is a rare article that I wish had a more clickbait title, like “Wayland Does Not Support Users with Accessible Input Needs,” in the hope that it would reach a larger audience.
Relatedly, every time I hear about Wayland, I become more baffled that this was the chosen replacement windowing system…
It probably says more about any other alternatives than Wayland as is often the case. My rough understanding is that most of the maintainers of X11 simply didn't want to work on it anymore for a...
Relatedly, every time I hear about Wayland, I become more baffled that this was the chosen replacement windowing system…
It probably says more about any other alternatives than Wayland as is often the case.
My rough understanding is that most of the maintainers of X11 simply didn't want to work on it anymore for a lot of valid reasons. They then decided to start anew and "do it right" which is what Wayland eventually became. In the process they over-corrected in a lot of ways causing a lot of issues. Many of those have been addressed since then but not all.
Since X11 isn't really maintained anymore (there is a fork by one of the maintainers but that has its own problems related to that one maintainer) and Wayland is the only other game in town it makes sense that it is the thing that is being picked up.
As to why it is the only game in town. It is pretty damn complicated to develop something like Wayland and not a lot of people actually want to invest the time and effort. It is incredibly difficult to find people to contribute to OSS projects and more importantly to have people stick around for the long ride.
And to be honest, for me as an average user Wayland in its current state is fine besides maybe one or two idiosyncrasies everything works as I would expect. But clearly there is still a bunch of work left to be done on other aspects.
It is also why I explicitly included this quote by the author of the post
This big and long-winded post isn't intended to punch down-- I'm genuinely looking for the right people to talk to to solve a very big and difficult problem. If you think you might be one of those people, or know someone who is, please reach out!
Even if the Wayland creators are somewhat boneheaded in their approach in certain areas. It is incredibly difficult to find people who want and can systematically donate their own time to OSS projects. It is also pretty draining if you are working on a project that is widely used by an insanely diverse group of users all demanding your time and attention. The latter often not done in the nicest way possible.
In reading some of the stories that have come out in response to this: this is a post recording the experience of a user who needs accessibility in Wayland, specifically with Talon. The questions...
In reading some of the stories that have come out in response to this: this is a post recording the experience of a user who needs accessibility in Wayland, specifically with Talon. The questions of development seem to be more complicated and two sided. In both the lobsters thread and the OSNews article, there are references to KDE developers saying that they think all the necessary supporting functionality is there in Wayland, and that they’ve reached out to the Talon developer to assist, only to be told that Wayland is not and will not be supported, with no room for discussion. Talon appears to be proprietary and closed-source, so there is no way to add Wayland support without the consent of the developer. It also seems to fit into the style of software one might call ‘genius-ware’: an ingenious, irreplaceable piece of software created by single, often very opinionated developer. To some extent, they don’t need to worry about supporting Wayland: their users may well find switching operating systems easier than losing Talon. The discussion of their ‘ultimatum’ is telling: essentially, they are saying that they refuse to do anything to support Wayland, will not discuss Wayland, and appear to imply that they just want the X11 APIs recreated, to exactly what they want, or they will refuse to support anything ever for anyone, including paying users. Gtk developers, meanwhile, seem happy to just write utterly awful, toxic responses, in line with their reputation.
So, in short, it seems to be typical interpersonal drama, and users that projects purport to care about get hurt.
Thanks for posting. This has unfortunately been on the horizon, clearly visible for all, and I truly mean all, to see coming (I’m not even using a Linux desktop, only via command line on servers,...
Thanks for posting. This has unfortunately been on the horizon, clearly visible for all, and I truly mean all, to see coming (I’m not even using a Linux desktop, only via command line on servers, and yet was aware about the lack of accessibility in Wayland vs. X11, although I only knew about issues on the “output” side, as the article calls it).
Sadly, due to the way (F)OSS works, unless there are vocal maintainers pushing for something to be made (or huge sponsors donating money with a dedicated purpose), whether that be a new protocol/standard or implementation, I think it just won’t come into existence at all.
I’ve always found it interesting that OSS/FOSS and your core tenants of libertarianism seem to share the flaw of “it’s okay you can just do it yourself and people will choose to because it makes...
I’ve always found it interesting that OSS/FOSS and your core tenants of libertarianism seem to share the flaw of “it’s okay you can just do it yourself and people will choose to because it makes sense!”
When you can’t do it yourself and you’re not falling within the standard curve of what people care about you’re just pushed out.
That missing gap is where there is that potential for commercial/paid solutions, but the biggest problem is that those would often rather try to hammer their square peg in a round hole than try to...
That missing gap is where there is that potential for commercial/paid solutions, but the biggest problem is that those would often rather try to hammer their square peg in a round hole than try to integrate their solution in line with the way the remainder of the community operates.
See how quickly AMD was embraced after being basically useless for decades once they took steps toward working with the kernel devs and not against.
It's not often commercially viable to adapt your entire pipeline to the whims of a community run project which might change and has its own factions within who can't even agree. I'm not saying...
hammer their square peg in a round hole than try to integrate their solution in line with the way the remainder of the community operates.
It's not often commercially viable to adapt your entire pipeline to the whims of a community run project which might change and has its own factions within who can't even agree.
I'm not saying businesses haven't also been stupid about it, but when you're looking at a product "hey lets add a ton of work to capture a fraction of a % of a % of a niche market" isn't a starting point.
I'm mostly thinking of trying to inject closed source in an open source pipeline. Of course it's gonna be harder, because nobody can help you get from A to B. The assorted enterprise VPN and...
I'm mostly thinking of trying to inject closed source in an open source pipeline. Of course it's gonna be harder, because nobody can help you get from A to B.
The assorted enterprise VPN and Video/Voice chat clients for Linux would be 100x better if they just opened the friggen source.
This gets back to my issue where while yes, that probably could help, but also I wouldn't bet on it being 100x better as there's very human issues that crop up even when you have it.
This gets back to my issue where while yes, that probably could help, but also I wouldn't bet on it being 100x better as there's very human issues that crop up even when you have it.
This isn't my blog post, it was first shared on lobster.rs and I think it is important to share it to raise awareness. From the authors original post on lobster.rs
This isn't my blog post, it was first shared on lobster.rs and I think it is important to share it to raise awareness.
From the authors original post on lobster.rs
This big and long-winded post isn't intended to punch down-- I'm genuinely looking for the right people to talk to to solve a very big and difficult problem. If you think you might be one of those people, or know someone who is, please reach out!
I've been following the descent into Wayland for GNU/Linux systems for a while now. It was my reason for moving to Mac OS. Software I relied on every day just wouldn't work on Wayland. There were...
I've been following the descent into Wayland for GNU/Linux systems for a while now. It was my reason for moving to Mac OS. Software I relied on every day just wouldn't work on Wayland.
There were forks, discussions, PRs, and eventually the throwing up of hands. But they /did/ have a Mac OS version which worked, so I'm there now.
The friction caused by the development team around 'Wayland protocols' has been well documented on YouTube.
I hope this person finds a solution that works for them.
I was always under the impression that virtually the entire problem with wayland is that they drew a hard line that essentially said (grossly simplifying) "Wayland is to be exclusively for getting...
I was always under the impression that virtually the entire problem with wayland is that they drew a hard line that essentially said (grossly simplifying) "Wayland is to be exclusively for getting content from GPU to screen, everything else needs to be done by the DE."
It was a hard breakup out of neccessity to bring the core of the system to a more managable, secure place. By hardlining this stance, it minimizes the chance this sort of thing needs to be done ever again.
But as with most hardline stances like this, it means immense growing pains. And it absolutely sucks, especially for users like the author.
Maybe all these AI boosters will be able to help roll this functionality out in record time. This would be an excellent case study in "the proof is in the pudding."
Not that the author will likely read this, but they’re more than welcome on the other POSIX desktop OS macos, which still has talon support (and I’d argue much better accessibility support in...
Not that the author will likely read this, but they’re more than welcome on the other POSIX desktop OS macos, which still has talon support (and I’d argue much better accessibility support in general).
This is generally a weakness of FOSS - it’s difficult to fund, in the general sense including labor, more niche interests. Desktop Linux has a hard enough time finding developers to do anything at all, where the kernel has the pockets of billion dollar companies going into it.
It looks like there is some good news. As others found, part of the issue isn't Wayland but the fact that the Talon dev basically was fed up with Linux in general. Well, as it turns out the guy...
It looks like there is some good news. As others found, part of the issue isn't Wayland but the fact that the Talon dev basically was fed up with Linux in general. Well, as it turns out the guy who also works on xdotool also decided to have a go at Talon and made some good progress.
It should be noted that this is the same dev who last year still found that porting xdotool to wayland was not feasible and the whole situation a confusing mess. Apparently he had another go this year and made more progress in finding a way to make it work. He did set up a kickstarter for xdotool for wayland so I do suspect it still involves a lot of work (and I wonder how much of it is working around Wayland or if Wayland also made some things easier in the last year) but it at least gives some hope for the future.
I asked how he's doing it, and he mentioned that right now it's unfortunately a lot of brute-force code: a separate conditional implementation for GNOME / KDE / wlroots + various compositor-specific tweaks. Apparently this requires interfacing with all-of wayland/wlroots protocols, DBus, GNOME's RemoteDesktop protocol, writing a GNOME extension
We should all be “accessibility maximalists”.
The actual statement from the Gtk developer is worth quoting:
I do not understand how, contrary to all the statements about standards and community and inclusion they tend to have, Gtk/Gnome developers tend to be so toxic and demeaning.
I think you misunderstand their point. I won't claim to know what that particular developer meant by their comments, but the accessibility topic is very much a double edged blade. See this post by EvilSkeleton, one of the Gnome devs putting in most of the accessibility work.
And the above comment by BuckyMcMonks really resonates with their frustration. There's no we in accessibility development. We are not putting in any of the work. We are only using what's given to us, and then complain that it's not complete.
Accessibility is a very important topic, and if you follow the development channels, there is actual work being done across the board. The thing is, there is a lot of work to do and not enough people to do it. Being more demanding or assuming bad faith is not the right way to go about this.
Wow... that post certainly furthers my point.
Yes, there is actually work. As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, too, the situation with Talon does not seem so one-sided. But for some reason, Gnome/Gtk devs, even when they are legitimately doing important, good work, seem insistent on taking a toxic, dismissive, demeaning tone toward everyone else. The tone of that post is simply not appropriate. The treatment of others is not appropriate. Whether or not the author is doing good work, they should really reconsider whether writing in such a way is constructive or at all respectful.
I use Gnome, and think it works quite well. I think the developers do good work. But whenever I have to read what they write, I tend to be dismayed that they seem so insistent on taking the tone that they do.
Have you read the post I linked?
Gnome devs are constantly abused everywhere on the internet, at times simply for being a Gnome dev other times for their UI design philosophy.
Read from section 3.3 in particular.
Yes?
I don't disagree. But then they respond by describing "privileged people spending at most 5 minutes to write erroneous posts" (in reference to a Register article), saying things like
or
And, of course, as you quoted,
Keep in mind that the framing reference of the post is a Mastodon discussion of a Register article where a GNOME developer has a dialogue with a Register author in response to an article about Xlibre that did make rather unwarranted claims about Wayland accessibility work, with the GNOME developer making comments like "Despite how many words you can print, its clear you can't actually understand any of it," and 'You write slop articles with no research, that sell VPN and "get more free ram" ads. Stop puffing your own farts.' What point am I supposed to take from this about "trash talking", and which people are doing it?
Again, I do not disagree with the GNOME developers here technically. And I do agree that they often get unwarranted criticism. But when someone chooses to write things like "stop puffing your own farts" (alatiera), "random privileged people" (TheEvilSkeleton), and "you are the reason why accessibility on Linux is shit" (TheEvilSkeleton), it seems incongruous to then complain about a "toxic environment", "nonconstructive criticism", and "ad hominem". Yes, they may be technically in the right, but that doesn't mean that their response to criticism, warranted or unwarranted, is appropriate or constructive, and they should understand that perhaps their reputation is influenced by their tone. I'd also suggest that perhaps, in responding to unwarranted criticism in that way, there is a risk of falling into a habit that results in responding to warranted criticism the same way.
I think there is, at least in the case of accessibility, a common goal of all the people in these discussions. Yet it feels like this sort of escalating tone and toxicity gets in the way.
Being a developer and face of a big open source project a lot of people depend on sadly comes with a lot of unwarranted hostility. GNOME is no exception there, but the project overall always has stood out to me. It is one thing to be opinionated about UI and UX, it is a whole other thing to look like you are actively fighting large parts of your user base. This partially falls into that as far as I am concerned.
A obvious example was the introduction of GNOME 3 where it took years for basic features to be added back. Stuff like Minimize/Maximize buttons, no options for a visible taskbar of any kind, no icons on the desktop, no system tray, no power off button (unless you knew to use alt).
Even if I still think that people shouldn't be hostile towards OSS devs in general. I do understand why there might be more hostility aimed towards GNOME devs in general.
Having said that, I do feel that in this case you probably are reading a bit too much of the escalating tone in there. To be clear, I do think that @Barney is reading way too little of it in there either. The fact that they specifically work on accessibility shows they do care about the subject, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. Which I think also adds to their frustration about people saying it isn't enough. Which from both points is actually valid, they are trying to add the features but can't add them all at once but until those features are present it simply isn't enough for the people that need them.
What they do get wrong is being absolutely dismissive to people needing the features and not contributing. Which I think is a) likely wrong exemplified by people with disabilities in their own project and other places they use as examples b) unfair to users as GNOME and GTK explicitly are user facing products made to serve a very wide audience.
I think it's because accessiblity fundementally requires being able to arbitrarily inject itself literally anywhere a user would normally be able to intervene with standard hardware.
That means virtual displays, virtual HIDs, and having access to metadata that you otherwise wouldn't want arbitrary stuff to access.
This is a rare article that I wish had a more clickbait title, like “Wayland Does Not Support Users with Accessible Input Needs,” in the hope that it would reach a larger audience.
Relatedly, every time I hear about Wayland, I become more baffled that this was the chosen replacement windowing system…
It probably says more about any other alternatives than Wayland as is often the case.
My rough understanding is that most of the maintainers of X11 simply didn't want to work on it anymore for a lot of valid reasons. They then decided to start anew and "do it right" which is what Wayland eventually became. In the process they over-corrected in a lot of ways causing a lot of issues. Many of those have been addressed since then but not all.
Since X11 isn't really maintained anymore (there is a fork by one of the maintainers but that has its own problems related to that one maintainer) and Wayland is the only other game in town it makes sense that it is the thing that is being picked up.
As to why it is the only game in town. It is pretty damn complicated to develop something like Wayland and not a lot of people actually want to invest the time and effort. It is incredibly difficult to find people to contribute to OSS projects and more importantly to have people stick around for the long ride.
And to be honest, for me as an average user Wayland in its current state is fine besides maybe one or two idiosyncrasies everything works as I would expect. But clearly there is still a bunch of work left to be done on other aspects.
It is also why I explicitly included this quote by the author of the post
Even if the Wayland creators are somewhat boneheaded in their approach in certain areas. It is incredibly difficult to find people who want and can systematically donate their own time to OSS projects. It is also pretty draining if you are working on a project that is widely used by an insanely diverse group of users all demanding your time and attention. The latter often not done in the nicest way possible.
In reading some of the stories that have come out in response to this: this is a post recording the experience of a user who needs accessibility in Wayland, specifically with Talon. The questions of development seem to be more complicated and two sided. In both the lobsters thread and the OSNews article, there are references to KDE developers saying that they think all the necessary supporting functionality is there in Wayland, and that they’ve reached out to the Talon developer to assist, only to be told that Wayland is not and will not be supported, with no room for discussion. Talon appears to be proprietary and closed-source, so there is no way to add Wayland support without the consent of the developer. It also seems to fit into the style of software one might call ‘genius-ware’: an ingenious, irreplaceable piece of software created by single, often very opinionated developer. To some extent, they don’t need to worry about supporting Wayland: their users may well find switching operating systems easier than losing Talon. The discussion of their ‘ultimatum’ is telling: essentially, they are saying that they refuse to do anything to support Wayland, will not discuss Wayland, and appear to imply that they just want the X11 APIs recreated, to exactly what they want, or they will refuse to support anything ever for anyone, including paying users. Gtk developers, meanwhile, seem happy to just write utterly awful, toxic responses, in line with their reputation.
So, in short, it seems to be typical interpersonal drama, and users that projects purport to care about get hurt.
Thanks for posting. This has unfortunately been on the horizon, clearly visible for all, and I truly mean all, to see coming (I’m not even using a Linux desktop, only via command line on servers, and yet was aware about the lack of accessibility in Wayland vs. X11, although I only knew about issues on the “output” side, as the article calls it).
Sadly, due to the way (F)OSS works, unless there are vocal maintainers pushing for something to be made (or huge sponsors donating money with a dedicated purpose), whether that be a new protocol/standard or implementation, I think it just won’t come into existence at all.
I’ve always found it interesting that OSS/FOSS and your core tenants of libertarianism seem to share the flaw of “it’s okay you can just do it yourself and people will choose to because it makes sense!”
When you can’t do it yourself and you’re not falling within the standard curve of what people care about you’re just pushed out.
That missing gap is where there is that potential for commercial/paid solutions, but the biggest problem is that those would often rather try to hammer their square peg in a round hole than try to integrate their solution in line with the way the remainder of the community operates.
See how quickly AMD was embraced after being basically useless for decades once they took steps toward working with the kernel devs and not against.
It's not often commercially viable to adapt your entire pipeline to the whims of a community run project which might change and has its own factions within who can't even agree.
I'm not saying businesses haven't also been stupid about it, but when you're looking at a product "hey lets add a ton of work to capture a fraction of a % of a % of a niche market" isn't a starting point.
I'm mostly thinking of trying to inject closed source in an open source pipeline. Of course it's gonna be harder, because nobody can help you get from A to B.
The assorted enterprise VPN and Video/Voice chat clients for Linux would be 100x better if they just opened the friggen source.
This gets back to my issue where while yes, that probably could help, but also I wouldn't bet on it being 100x better as there's very human issues that crop up even when you have it.
This isn't my blog post, it was first shared on lobster.rs and I think it is important to share it to raise awareness.
From the authors original post on lobster.rs
I've been following the descent into Wayland for GNU/Linux systems for a while now. It was my reason for moving to Mac OS. Software I relied on every day just wouldn't work on Wayland.
There were forks, discussions, PRs, and eventually the throwing up of hands. But they /did/ have a Mac OS version which worked, so I'm there now.
The friction caused by the development team around 'Wayland protocols' has been well documented on YouTube.
I hope this person finds a solution that works for them.
I was always under the impression that virtually the entire problem with wayland is that they drew a hard line that essentially said (grossly simplifying) "Wayland is to be exclusively for getting content from GPU to screen, everything else needs to be done by the DE."
It was a hard breakup out of neccessity to bring the core of the system to a more managable, secure place. By hardlining this stance, it minimizes the chance this sort of thing needs to be done ever again.
But as with most hardline stances like this, it means immense growing pains. And it absolutely sucks, especially for users like the author.
Maybe all these AI boosters will be able to help roll this functionality out in record time. This would be an excellent case study in "the proof is in the pudding."
Not that the author will likely read this, but they’re more than welcome on the other POSIX desktop OS macos, which still has talon support (and I’d argue much better accessibility support in general).
This is generally a weakness of FOSS - it’s difficult to fund, in the general sense including labor, more niche interests. Desktop Linux has a hard enough time finding developers to do anything at all, where the kernel has the pockets of billion dollar companies going into it.
It looks like there is some good news. As others found, part of the issue isn't Wayland but the fact that the Talon dev basically was fed up with Linux in general. Well, as it turns out the guy who also works on xdotool also decided to have a go at Talon and made some good progress.
It should be noted that this is the same dev who last year still found that porting xdotool to wayland was not feasible and the whole situation a confusing mess. Apparently he had another go this year and made more progress in finding a way to make it work. He did set up a kickstarter for xdotool for wayland so I do suspect it still involves a lot of work (and I wonder how much of it is working around Wayland or if Wayland also made some things easier in the last year) but it at least gives some hope for the future.
Edit:
Apparantly it is a lot of work arounds