by jchw | 2025-08-10 17:39:39+00:00
> TBH, "need" doesn't come into it. It can't. There's no justification for not maintaining feature parity with current competitors.

Firstly, again, choosing your own premise here isn't going to do you or me any good. I'm happy to waste my time because for some fucked up reason I actually enjoy participating in threads like these, but unless you also do, I have to warn you that this is simply a waste of time as I'm not interested in this premise and it won't do any good to convince any Wayland proponents. To put it bluntly, your opinion on where this argument starts is really not material because nobody really asked.

Secondly, this premise is terrible anyways. First, it starts with the assumption that there's no justification for why not to provide the ability to position the cursor directly, which isn't true, and you seem to recognize that when you mention "security" later on (though that is certainly not the only reason.) And anyway, this premise pushes the idea that you have to justify not introducing features when designing an API, which is just silly. Wayland started with a completely clean slate, and there are plenty of things that X11 and Win32 can do that Wayland can't do, but I don't see anyone complaining about the lack of X11 colormaps or the ability to run without compositing. This idea applies much better when it comes to removing features: you would need justification to remove a feature that already exists. Wayland doesn't have this feature (absolutely positioning the pointer), so it has the opposite: it would need to justify adding the feature. But when Wayland developers get a feature request, they don't just blindly add the feature. They dig deeper into what applications really want and try to figure out the best primitive that allows the desktop and application to work together. Just letting applications position the cursor absolutely is pretty inelastic; you can develop primitives that are maybe a bit less powerful for applications, but are much more powerful for the desktop as a whole.

The reason I haven't been talking about justifications for why there isn't an explicit API to set the cursor position is because I think that would mislead someone into thinking that's a worthwhile thing to debate about when in reality it's not. If anyone thinks this is actually a good idea for an API in Wayland they can try to add it, you don't have to be anyone special to do it. In practice though I really strongly believe that if someone made an earnest effort to do so they would wind up changing their mind anyways after actually understanding the entire scope of what it entails in the frame of how Wayland works.

> Further, users don't care about your purity tests, they care about being able to run applications, like KiCAD.

> There is no justification in the world for "It's a feature to have applications that break only on our system". After all, with this specific feature, there's lots of ways to allow it without compromising security.

> You want security on your desktop? You get it. I want KiCAD on mine? I get it.

> What, specifically, is the reason that you feel so strongly that only one option must be enforced?

> I'm not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious here: how does enforcing "no pointer warping" for you and relaxing it for me, hurt you?

I've been very carefully to be specific in hopefully every post I've made so far: what Wayland lacks is the ability to absolutely position the mouse cursor. It does not lack the ability to do mouse wrapping, for example, or constrain the pointer, or any of that stuff, it just can't be done the way KiCAD currently does it for existing desktop systems. These things work in existing Wayland software. That's actually the point of my first post in this thread a few levels up where I point out that KiCAD developers have made the messaging confusing, making it sound like these problems are inherent to Wayland when they're usually not. I stand by this.

I also claim that I don't really find it surprising that KiCAD developers are not excited to have to deal with Wayland things that basically don't exist in other desktops. I personally think they should prefer XWayland for now and continue leaning on wxWidgets to improve Wayland support over time. I fully believe wxWidgets can evolve to add higher level abstractions where lower level ones fail on Wayland, basically solving the problem for more than just KiCAD. GTK and Qt themselves have largely done this already.

And also, I don't feel that only one option should be enforced. In fact I don't even care if people only use Wayland, I'd be happy to see Arcan succeed, or people using Wayback, or even X11Libre, whatever. Moreover if someone wants to propose a Wayland protocol that allows querying and setting the pointer position, they can do that. I am actually not overall a fan of how monolithic the Linux/free software desktop has become. Even though I prefer systemd, for example, I generally dislike the way it took over and how everything now has very systemd-specific logic all over it. That's part of why I like Wayland, everyone sees it as being hugely opinionated, but actually it's not, it's basically a very minimal protocol that can be extended infinitely to do whatever you want, and each compositor gets to make it's own choices. As an application developer, this does cause you some headaches especially during the transition as you have to cope with some fragmentation especially if you do a lot of lower-level (in terms of desktop) stuff. This does not imply though, that applications should do a bunch of Wayland specific things, instead, I believe they should push features like pointer wrapping to a higher level to the point where the implementation can be done the old-school way or using Wayland protocols. (Some applications were basically already here and just needed an implementation.)

The thing is though, even though all of the Wayland compositors are totally free to implement whatever functionality they see fit, and they absolutely do, btw, they still don't implement an exact match for the API that X11 has here. I think all of them actually agree that the old API isn't particularly good. Even if they wanted to implement it such that applications like KiCAD could just ignore all of this, they literally can't: the old X11 APIs (i.e. XWarpPointer) are not designed for multiple seat, multiple cursor systems, even though X11 was extended to support many cursors a long time ago. The Wayland API is just simply going to require more work to implement versus systems that have legacy APIs that operate on a single global cursor. And simply treating an arbitrary choice for which seat/cursor to use is just not a very compelling decision.

FWIW, KiCAD does run on Wayland natively, but until it runs with full parity, it's probably going to be better ran under XWayland instead. And unless you desperately want something Wayland offers that X11 doesn't ("perfect" frames, more seamless high DPI rendering, better handling of VFR, color management) it just doesn't make sense to sweat over some applications still needing to fall back. As far as I'm concerned the XWayland fallback should continue to exist long into the future, ideally until it's so old that the applications that still need it are better ran under an emulation environment. (I'm not sure if that's even in my lifetime though.)

If a commercial vendor went out and tried to make a next-generation desktop system, without the baggage of any existing systems, I would be willing to bet a fortune they would come to agree on Wayland's limitations for unprivileged applications. Maybe they, together, marginally improve desktop security and privacy, but most importantly, I think that the Wayland way leads to better software, that makes less assumptions and needs less heuristics. This isn't about ideological purity, at the end of the day. It's about trying to improve the status quo. Improving the status quo is fucking hard.