The compositor can implement that protocol and just respond with "this compositor doesn't support SSDs". GNOME does this, so all toolkits must use CSDs if they wanna work on the most popular Wayland compositor.
Incidentally, that's hell for all the simple libraries out there which just exist to get a GL window on the screen. GLFW, GLEW, SDL, etc. all have to implement CSDs now if they wanna work with Wayland. It also means that it's no longer feasible to just make a Linux application which uses the windowing system directly; everything must use a huge toolkit now.
EDIT: To clarify, I don't think this is an issue with Wayland, but with GNOME. There's no reason it couldn't have supported SSDs like every other Wayland compositor. But as it stands, it hurts the Wayland ecosystem.
The way GNOME is built it's not really possible architecturally for them to support SSDs in Wayland. Maybe that will change if they ever get around to redesigning mutter and gnome-shell, but I wouldn't wait for it.
Gnome could stop being unreasonably obstructionist, but that indeed seems unlikely.
That's just one example, but GNOME has a reputation for not respecting Linux desktop diversity for a reason.
But in any case I don't understand what is contentious about that. Some pieces are shared between GNOME and XFCE, but a lot of pieces are different and applications have always needed to choose. If they weren't trying to be different they wouldn't have made a separate desktop environment with their own separate libxfce libraries and components. (To GNOME's credit, they have gotten rid of most of the "libgnome" things since then, but now an application that wants to speak to certain GNOME-specific pieces is usually expected to use their private dbus protocols, things that XFCE would never implement anyway)
Incorrect. I am using a single example to illustrate a trend. A single example to illustrate what "unreasonably obstructionist" looks like. That particular incident made everybody roll their eyes but it hardly surprised anybody because GNOME has earned this reputation. Even back then nobody was particularly surprised by the GNOME arrogance, and I've not seen this change.
(Also, maybe I'm getting old but 10 years ago really isn't that long ago.)
If you're trying to illustrate the trend that GNOME and XFCE (and KDE, and LXQT, and MATE, and Budgie, and Mint...) all have different goals and ideas for how applications should behave then yes, I would say that much is obvious by now, and it has only gotten more obvious over the last few years. If you have a technical solution to this then I'd love to hear it, but aside from that I don't care to bicker about whose fault it is that your applications broke, because honestly no answer is going to pleasing for you to hear. Unless I'm mistaken then we aren't paying customers, this is all just random no-warranty open source and there's no support hotline that's going to care about what's broken.
I'm not trying to dispel any perceptions either, if you have a deep seated belief that GNOME (or XFCE, or anything really) are "not playing nice" because they removed features from upstream, there's nothing I can really say to you to change that view. If you want to challenge your own perceptions, I'd suggest you start developing a new open source desktop and application platform yourself over a period of many years just to see how much work it is, and how it's practically impossible to support everything that every app developer asks for when none of them are paying you a cent.
And please don't exaggerate, non-GTK applications do work in GNOME. Qt5 has native CSDs that will show up in GNOME. If the application is a game or something that doesn't support CSD then the experience is somewhat degraded but they still work. You can resize and move any window by holding Super and Left/Middle clicking. I won't pretend the situation is ideal but I also don't believe it's totally unusable or on a bad trajectory at the moment—like I said the other libraries are working on getting CSD support too.
I honestly don't understand what you're talking about here? If you want to get a window on the screen with OpenGL or Vulkan you don't implement anything special for Wayland.
In fact with Vulkan+Wayland, it's fairly easy to do it without any third-party dependencies, with OpenGL you'll probably need EGL which is a Khronos dependency. Here's some slightly outdated example code [1].
[1] https://gist.github.com/Miouyouyou/ca15af1c7f2696f66b0e01305...
Possibly this is a subtle distinction, but I do think it matters.
[1] https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/blob/ma...
Go ahead and make a basic Wayland window in GNOME. Compare the user experience to KDE or Sway.
I was objecting to the fact that you said that windows did not have this capability without the server-side extensions, whereas I think they can be through configure. I did not dispute whether sway had server-side decorations or not.
wlroots performed very poorly on my i5-3427U with 4000 series iGPU. Very poorly. I ended up using neither X nor Wayland and instead having mpv render straight to the frame buffer (--vo=gpu --gpu-context=drm)
X.org, Firefox, and Xterm all work very well on it though. As do other apps like gschem and openscad.
I think you don't mean that the Wayland protocol forces slowness but that the compositor you used was slow. The one I use is fast.
> And if you don't like the window decorations (say, they take up too much screen space) your choices are suck it up, or if you're lucky and willing to spend a bunch of time reconfigure every different toolkit your apps use.
No, there are protocols to negotiate whether an app has server side decoration or not and the compositor has the last say.
> basic stuff that worked fine on X11 doesn't work on wayland in the name of "security"
On only the core Wayland protocols you're absolutely correct, you can't even implement desktop shells with those. This means there must be extensions and there are 3 different classes: KDE, GNOME, wlroots, with tools for and incompatibility between each. The wlroots extensions are designed to be accepted into the standard and for wider Wayland acceptance they probably should be.
Screen sharing is still a particular issue that we are starting to see solved with the advent of Pipewire.
Wayland desktops are definitely usable. I've been happy with a wlroots based one (Wayfire) for a few months and KDE before that (from what I see GNOME has been perfect for a while).
One of the last standing real issues I'm facing is kerfuffle with Nvidia drivers, especially the ones paired with Intel GPUs, but I think (surprisingly) Nvidia are actually working on fixing that.