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PiP protocol addition...!?

PiP protocol addition...!?

Posted Oct 24, 2025 8:02 UTC (Fri) by callegar (guest, #16148)
In reply to: PiP protocol addition...!? by pizza
Parent article: KDE Plasma 6.5 released

> Now, how do you propose getting *all* of them to agree on, much less implement, anything?

To have some XDG_something cross-toolkit variable being looked up in addition to QT_QPA_PLATFORM or GDK_BACKEND seems more a matter of coordination than a matter of implementation effort... and even if there are many toolkits, two of them are really "major" in terms of usage share, so having those two using a single agreed upon env variable could hopefully push most of the others to do the same...

This lack of coordination in minor details remains a pain point. The fact that differently to what we were used to with X11, basically every single toolkit and every single compositor can do as it wants way to often results in unpredictable results.

Things like xpra having a wayland client that is apparently unusable with plasma (because contextual menus disappear) but OK on gnome and the author honestly saying that this thing will remain unfixed as "wayland is too difficult". Or waypipe being hard to use because way to often rather than getting a window transferred to the client with waypipe, you get it to appear on the server with Xwayland. Or pinentry wrap scripts having trouble in interpreting the environment to know if it should prompt graphically or textually (so again you too easily when connecting remotely you end up with a pin entry dialog displayed graphically on the server rather than textually on the ssh session on the client).


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PiP protocol addition...!?

Posted Oct 24, 2025 10:51 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> This lack of coordination in minor details remains a pain point. The fact that differently to what we were used to with X11, basically every single toolkit and every single compositor can do as it wants way to often results in unpredictable results.

Uh, how is that any different than the situation with X11 with its combinatorial explosion of extensions?

PiP protocol addition...!?

Posted Oct 24, 2025 21:59 UTC (Fri) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

> Uh, how is that any different than the situation with X11 with its combinatorial explosion of extensions?

X11 was certainly not without its issues that, depending on the specific time in history oscillated between somehow bothering and really very bad. Most of the issues that I have historically encountered was with hardware support, though. I still remember the frustration with a laptop where small portions of letters on the terminal were erratically not printed due to some 2D acceleration issue. Today hardware support is generally sufficiently good, so maybe I notice other things more.

Or maybe I notice them more because the solution _seems_ easy (agreeing on a single env variable) and evidently it is not.


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