> The wine situation is kind of unique. Programs should not be able to force their locations, the wayland devs are correct here.

Absolutely not. This is needed for many things, and that you think it can simply be stripped shows your lack of appreciation of the needs of many other users and software.

How will you without this for instance make:

- a notification daemon that creates a notification bubble at some part of the screen
- a toolbar of some sorts that sits at a specific place on the screen and is summoned on command
- a collapsible terminal application that summons itself on a certain global hotkey and otherwise lays hidden
- any such application that summons itself
- a program that rearranges other windows for any particular purpose such as tiling them in a specific way that the user wants

All these things obviously exist as of this moment, and are used by many users, and can't be made to work on Wayland because the developers were “correct” according to you in their assumption that none might ever need this.

> I'm also not convinced there is _nothing_ the wine devs could do to resolve this. They already suggested some ways to deal with the lack of APIs but they refuse to implement them more on principal rather than practical issues.

Your conviction would be wrong; I've been in the same situation and talked to the Wayland developers and it is they who refuse to implement various features that are highly requæsted based on principle.

> In the end, if only Wine is using xwayland, thats not a particularly bad position to be in and Wayland seems to work well for native linux applications.

Yes, if it would be only Wine, perhaps, but it's not only Wine — and that you think it's only Wine shows either having never researched the mountain of issues, or willfully ignoring them because these concerns are immediately encountered when researching the issue of developers of many an application who are not pleased that their application fundamentally can't work on Wayland because it endeavored to not include basic functionality that every other display protocol has.

These were not “mistakes” — the reason everything from Windows, to X11, to Quartz has these features is because users need them for what they wish to do.

And this is only about programs choosing the positions of their own windows. A simple, trivial other thing is every time a new Hearthstone expansion comes out and I buy about 80 new packs with in-game currency that I game insists that I sit through the animations of opening them which bores me. I refuse and rather simply minimize the Hearthstone window and even though it doesn't have focus rapidly send it endless spacebar key events with a trivial xdotool command which then does this in about 15 minutes without needing my attention — such a simple thing cannot be done in Wayland at the moment and most likely never will because “users should not be able to simulate key events” as far as the Wayland developers are concerned, which is obviously a function with many use cases.

“Users should not be able to ...” was the mantra of the Wayland developers when they started, and in many cases they have relented and allowed them because they realized they severely underestimated for how many things users do need to do that.