Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Jan 16, 2025 8:12 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050)
In reply to: Are we there yet, Mom? by eru
Parent article: Xfce 4.20 released

> What I find concerning from the release notes is that apparently porting common desktop functionality to Wayland still appears to be very difficult.

The functionality you listed is working fine in other Wayland DEs. It's not yet in Xfce's Wayland session because the transition is incomplete there.

> Still no screen-shotting in Wayland after all these years? And this is is supposed to be the designated successor of X11.

The X mechanisms used for this allow any client to constantly & silently perform surveillance of everything the user sees (and does). E.g. remember the recent malicious Pidgin plugin which captured the screen contents and sent them off to some server.

Replicating this isn't universally considered in scope for the Wayland protocol, to put it diplomatically. There won't be any Wayland protocol extension which allows this and is supported by all Wayland compositors.

Others have mentioned the portal mechanism for this, which is used by many Wayland DEs (it can also work in X sessions though). It involves the user actively choosing what to share with which application, i.e. a form of user consent. This prevents the kind of surveillance possible via X.