I'm working on a window switching tool for Wayland that's kinda like Alt-Tab. However, it seems like there's no compositor agnostic way to do things like:

• List all currently open windows
• Ask which window is currently focused
• Focus a specific window

Therefore, if I want my tool to support multiple compositors, I have to re-implement this logic for each compositor.

Is the motivation security through program isolation? That doesn't quite make sense to me since programs still can do the above things, they just have to do it compositor specifically: hyprctl clients on Hyprland, niri msg windows for Niri, etc. Also, you could just have a Wayland API that requires elevated privileges for doing these things, which the user would have to opt-in to for a specific program.

I feel like this design of Wayland causes a lot of fragmentation. There are a lot of tools that are for example Hyprland-only.

Could you please enlighten me on why Wayland has this design?

Some wise people said that it was originally designed for car infotainment. Everything else is an addition.

There's probably a PR or a thread somewhere with a bunch of very angry nerds fighting over whether this is even a useful feature and there’s no API because they can't reach a compromise. There is no design.

Some design choices of Wayland are really weird.

That said do you know of the wlr foreign toplevel management protocol? A lot of the smaller compositors support it. But yes a lot like e.g. Mutter and I think kwin do not.

Congratulations you have discovered the new hotness being forced upon Linux community (only 17 years in development and counting lol) isn't so hot.

My favourite quote from the linked article:

"Instead of providing a better way of doing something, common features are not supported at all, and instead it's the job of everyone else in the ecosystem to agree on a standard. That's not a stunning argument in favor of replacing something that already exists and that has already been standardized in X11!"

citation -

Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years

https://omar.yt/posts/wayland-set-the-linux-desktop-back-by-10-years

I just made the spicy decision to implement hyprland IPC in my window manager...

Because Wayland sucks. It was designed to suck.

E: Lol at the 1:1 ratio atm.

I would imagine part of this is because multi seat (or cursor) wayland is just as important as single seat wayland.

Yeah let's all go back to X it was so much better 🫠

Forced by who exactly?

Works on my desktop, much better than X. What problems do you have with wayland?

Gnome board members most likely blocking it while embezzling donations

KDE, some distros.

A piece of software using another piece of software does not mean forcing anything on anyone.

Moreover, KDE runs on X11 and I don't know of any distribution which does not provide Xorg in their repositories.

KDE is dropping support for X11 next year: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/

So what?

Should they support X11 forever despite the fact that even the maintainers of X11 are barely maintaining X11?

Are they forcing you to do anything?

The design of it is not compatible with the old paradigm of graphical interfaces which were the ones created by teams of researchers trying to figure out how to most effectively open a dialogue between computer and user. There is no reference implementation. It’s broken in a million little ways. No xscreensaver.

But if I had to name just one main thing: the whole point of wayland is to make it easier for the programmers of x to handle a large complex codebase, which they accomplished by throwing everything out and starting over from scratch instead of migrating to tools, process and even languages that make that precise problem easier to manage and at the time of waylands conception we had forty fucking years of history showing vast improvement in the tools, processes and languages aimed at big complex shit.

The fact that anyone will defend the decision to abandon x for the absolute slop delivery tube that wayland became in an age where we have access to, like it or not, the ultimate programming tool in the form of cheap and fast large language models is insane.

All time L.

I'm not saying KDE should do one thing or another, I understand that maintaining code, even unchanging code as you claimed, takes effort.

Yes, they're going to force me to switch to Wayland on this machine. I'm on X because I need autokey, pyautogui, and TeamViewer. I need to look into alternatives and switch, except I don't have the option of replacing TeamViewer.

I'm not really partisan in the whole X vs Wayland jihad, I run Wayland on my 2 other machines and don't notice any difference.

IIRC Wayland is only a spec, compositora are the implementation. I believe Wayland has a reference competitor, maybe target that?

and don’t notice any difference.

The tldr of why Wayland was adopted in the first place and the next hotness will also be forced upon us as well. Lol

everything you could want and more already was dreamt up and has a PR for it, you can thank Gnome for stonewalling everything for half a decade or more

Best option right now are to use the following protocol extensions

https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-activation-v1 this extension covers your setting focus needs, but getting a list of other wayland clients is a bit trickier.

https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-foreign-toplevel-list-v1 this extension can list clients in theory, but its missing support for both gnome and kde.

Some of the unstable extensions have wide adoption, so perhaps take a look at each of them to see if they provide the functionality you want. Good luck!

Edit: was curious and did some more digging. KDE has their own protocol extension for this https://wayland.app/protocols/kde-plasma-window-management

As for gnome, I couldn’t find anything that seemed suitable, other than writing a gnome extension specifically to support this. I imagine that doesn’t fit within your vision for your project though.

Anyway, I had fun looking into this. Once again good luck!

username checks out?

I am not saying that software written in C is bad

after implying that code written in C is inherently insecure 🥴

Þis, but unironically

Why don’t you “check out” some code that involves the ops issue and try to solve it instead of trolling people.

because i'm fine with wayland. why don't you?

I mean, it wasn't, but X11 also took like 20 years to get to where Xorg took over, and then Xorg has been puttering for another 15. Dunno what it is with Linux graphics that lends itself to such long development cycles. ...I mean I do know, it's some of the worst possible stacks that benefits the least from the bazaar approach.

I think Wayland deserves some blame for taking the hard line on security. Every other security policy software lets you move the slider between max security or no security at all. But not Wayland, mommy knows best. Honestly, Wayland and Gnome deserver each other, both projects have the same insufferable approach where they think their users are idiots.

I don’t want to fix wayland. Wayland is bad.

Even if my heartfelt love for the op overcame my revulsion for wayland I would not put any effort into fixing this issue because the structural problems with wayland make it a battle with an entrenched system of powerful organizations with skin in the game and outspoken users looking for a fight as opposed to a simple pr.

Think for a second about the context of what you are aligning yourself with in these replies to me: wayland, a collection of protocols and apis in a trenchcoat, doesn’t have a standardized one for alt tab. That’s not because of a cabal of stereotypes rubbing their hands together and laughing over a meeting table shaped like the Mercator projection, but because the wayland devs abdicated responsibility by not making a reference implementation and that left space open for anyone who wanted to to stake their claim.

Now rather than looking at the design and deciding that we need 12 foot posts to support the back side of the building as the land slopes off we are at the mercy of whatever the supplier brings to the site today.

Why would I volunteer my time to that? Why would anyone?

why do you want me to spend time on that then?

Because you’re fine with wayland.

The op is flailing, trying to use the system you’re at the very least fine with but I now suspect you feel a certain affinity towards but they can’t. They can’t use wayland unless you help. Their various windows are shuffled on top of one another and require the use of a mouse to switch between. You could be helping the op instead of trolling. But you’re not.

Why are you not helping the op, umbrella?

if i'm fine with how it is, why would i help change it?

So people trying to use it could more easily do so.

Because you believe in the principles behind it and want to bring them in harmony with the ops problem.

As an action in support of the open source principles you espouse, improving the commons for no other reason than your empathy and love for the human spirit!

99% of people who wants to use it does. wayland literally just works.

What are you trying to say here?

It clearly has a serious problem that the op is experiencing. Why not help the op instead of dismissing their concerns? It really seems like you’re trolling or at least engaging in bad faith here…

why don't you? you seem bothered by it and maybe op stumbled upon something worth looking into.

I already answered that. I don’t think wayland should exist let alone be fixed and even if I wanted to I described the development environment around it as sclerotic and sycophantic.

then why do you care so much? just use x11.

I do whenever possible. If you’ll remember, I replied to the ops query about why wayland is the way it is.

A better question is why are you replying to me over and over again asking circular questions?

Because Wayland sucks ass and their devs are just like Gnome's ditactors

i'm genuinely surprised this isn't more downvoted given the nature of this community. lol

What does Gnome dislike about the idea so much?

I'll wait for the cancer to eventually kill me while walking in the woods. I'll leave it written that you offered yourself to go find my body and carry it to the cemetery.

With a name like TrollAccount69, maybe they’re trying to see if you have limited context window :p

(Not that i’m calling you a bot, but this would be funny way to find out if you were)

I should tag myself as a bot, that would be funny.

gnome-shell probably has its own proprietary way to do it.
idk, I use Niri (which also does).