"GNOME and KDE have dbus APIs for some (but not all) of these things, and sway has
its own IPC, and other compositors probably have similar solutions. However, they
all use different mechanisms, which means that if you are writing say, screenshot
application you either have to write a different backend for every compositor, or
choose just one or two to support.
"Something all of these types of applications have in common is they need to be able to inspect and/or modify state from other applications or the compositor itself. Which wayland's security model normally prevents. I think a major gap in wayland, is having a way for an application to run with escalated permissions so it can have access to other applications. Unfortunately, I don't have any great ideas on what that would look like."
and then, later in the thread:
"for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the screenshot tool etc. And then swaygrab doesn't even (currently) have an option to capture a rectangular region."
The entire thread linked to above is worth reading.
My own takeaway is that Wayland is just way too immature to compete with X for my power-user use cases.
"GNOME and KDE have dbus APIs for some (but not all) of these things, and sway has its own IPC, and other compositors probably have similar solutions. However, they all use different mechanisms, which means that if you are writing say, screenshot application you either have to write a different backend for every compositor, or choose just one or two to support.
"Something all of these types of applications have in common is they need to be able to inspect and/or modify state from other applications or the compositor itself. Which wayland's security model normally prevents. I think a major gap in wayland, is having a way for an application to run with escalated permissions so it can have access to other applications. Unfortunately, I don't have any great ideas on what that would look like."
and then, later in the thread:
"for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the screenshot tool etc. And then swaygrab doesn't even (currently) have an option to capture a rectangular region."
The entire thread linked to above is worth reading.
My own takeaway is that Wayland is just way too immature to compete with X for my power-user use cases.
It might be ok for users with simple needs.