So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that’s a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time were fair. It was primarily born out some frustrations I had with the entire ecosystem, and it was not like I was the only sole voice. There are other people out there you can find that encountered their own unique Wayland problems and wrote about it.
With that post, I probably cast myself as some anti-Wayland guy which is my own doing, but I promise you that is not the case. You can check my mpv commits, and it’s businesses as usual. Lots of Wayland fixes, features, and all that good stuff. Quite some time has passed since then, and it is really overdue look at the situation again with all the new developments in mind. To be frank, my original post is very outdated and it is not fair to leave it up in its current state without acknowledging the work that has been done. So in comparison to 3 years ago, I have a much more positive outlook now.
Is there a tiling Wayland compositor out there that supports applying custom shaders to windows (similar to picom)? This has been a known limitation for many years. And I brought it up myself with a couple of compositors’ developers, and they told me that it would break direct scan-out, and I told them that I would be fine with that, and then discussions fizzled out.
I also tried an x11vnc alternative I don’t remember the name of, and besides the generally buggy experience, it completely broke when power management kicked on the sever side (turning off the monitor IIRC). So that’s another show stopper, although maybe not as relevant as custom shader support which I need for applying my custom color inversion shaders to specific windows, otherwise, my vision would go bad quickly.
So yeah, I will be sticking with my Awesome WM (+picom +x11vnc) setup for a while too.