Are We Wayland Yet?

For example Ubuntu switched to using it by default a while back. Unfortunately since Wayland prevents the usual screen sharing in many popular communications applications from working I usually have to go back to X in order to do any real work remotely.

Combine that with some significant bugs that seem to happen in recent versions of Ubuntu/X but not Ubuntu/Wayland and now I have no fully working GUI on my Ubuntu machine because both options now have game-stopping problems.

I do understand that there are good reasons for Wayland wanting to do what it's doing and breaking the old-fashioned screen sharing is a consequence of those. I understand that applications should be updated and other packages should be used and so on. I hope that these issues can be fixed sooner rather than later and we can all benefit from the technical advantages of Wayland.

But if I'm in a conference call with important people about an important subject you can count the number of excuses I care about on the fingers of no hands. Wayland won't be ready for "normal" users until essential functionality works out of the box.

Screen-sharing is working out of the box for me on both gnome and wlroots. File a bug to your distro maintainers if it doesn't.

I do appreciate your response but ironically you're also demonstrating exactly the point I was trying to make. As long as I have to worry about installing x-y-z-beta (but make sure it's the one from two weeks ago because last week's had a regression) to make essential basic functionality work we aren't really talking about a serious offering for normal users.

In reality like almost every other Ubuntu user I've talked to in real life about this I just switch back to X if I need to screen share. And if that stops working I'll switch from Ubuntu to something that does. Like building my own PC with micro-optimised component choices, tweaking Linux system software was interesting for a while and sometimes got great results, but life's too short to keep doing that forever. Now I just want something that does its job.

Of course it does. My argument is that for many users Wayland's time has not yet come. The kind of very noticeable issues some of us have mentioned in this discussion need to be fixed so things work normally as standard before that will really happen.