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 To be frank, my original post is very outdated and it is not fair to leave it up in its current state without acknowledging the work that has been done.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.
The only thing that’s keeping me from Wayland full-time is the push to talk mess. I use Mumble to talk with friends. Under Wayland, to make it work you have to force mumble to run in the xwayland mode and even then, push to talk will only work when you’re focused on xwayland windows. Want to look up something on web browser? Cool, now your push to talk button won’t register. You have to click on any currently running xwayland application. As I need that push to talk on a regular basis, it’s absolutely infuriating.
This is such a major issue for streaming. It’s why I had to stop using Gnome. Global hotkeys for OBS, Discord, etc are such a crucial part of it. It’s actually shocking to me how Linux has moved on without global hotkeys and nobody seems to care.
The Plasma solution is sweet, but I’m sticking to X11 until Wayland actually functions for streaming.
been a while since I used kde & wayland, but I remember there being something in the Plasma settings -
random redditor said “Go under “KDE Settings->Applications->Legacy X11 App Support” and click to allow keylogging for all keyboard keys”, I think this was it. Had discord (running in xwayland) accepting my global hotkeys with no problems
Oh, you’re right. They have that option and it works, thank you. Though now I wish they had a setting to allow only one specific key. I see it’s either function keys/function+whatever you press while holding function key/everything. But then again, I only use 2 applications running in xwayland so it’s fine.