it's very easy to
[complex list of tasks]
This is the typical HN fallacy.Go try to explain your mother over the phone how to edit a sway configuration to 'add a virtual screen of specified resolution'.
Compare that to clicking on the cast icon and selecting a TV.
source: spent years supporting Linux for my tech-illiterate parents.
Support is basically zero these days. He uses Chrome and Firefox and LibreOffice. He occasionally fires up the Simon Tatham Portable Puzzles collection. I have uBlock Origin installed on both browsers. I installed XFCE on day one, spent a couple of hours demonstrating things, and then left.
Every five or six years I buy a new tiny, NUC-like machine, configure it up, pull his home directory across, and then send him the replacement. There's more work on the phone getting him to plug the cables in properly than anything else.
Year of the Linux desktop? It's been more than a decade.
> Also, to my understanding, Wayland is still not ready for such a use case.
With an example showing how to do it.
To answer your point, this wouldn't faze any sway user, and it is perfectly scriptable, you can add a button or script to perform the three server-side steps. Of course, gnome includes a button to cast to a nearby miracast-enabled screen.
I'm not answering to my mother, I'd set it up for her with a nice shortcut. And she probably wouldn't be using sway.
You also need a complex list of tasks for miracast.
* Turn on the TV (simple enough, but since we're counting steps...)
* Make sure the miracast option is enabled, and the TV is discoverable. That one is impossible to explain over the phone -- unlike a command line -- as every TV burries this under a different menu.
* Find the right button on the "client" PC (might require enabling an option before?) and click it.
See https://github.com/any1/wayvnc/pull/200/files
The script in the PR does something a bit different, but it's only an example and can be modified to do what I described in the first paragraph.
* add a virtual screen of specified resolution (The command is `swaymsg create_output`, then adjust its position and resolution if the default 1080p on the right are not to your liking)
* start a vnc server for that screen (`wayvnc -o HEADLESS-1`)
* start a vnc client on the laptop