Show HN: X11 tool to share a screen area in any video meeting

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345 points splitbrain | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 13:11 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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OsrsNeedsf2P ◴[14 Oct 24 14:08 UTC] No.41837682[source]▶

I love how simple this is- Barely 100 lines or C++ (ignoring comments). That's one thing that makes me prefer X11 over Wayland.

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ajross ◴[14 Oct 24 14:32 UTC] No.41837906[source]▶

>>41837682 #

Yeah. I mean, not to deny the decades of arguments over its warts, but it's kind of amazing to me the extent to which X11 has emerged as, well, the simplest/best and most hackable desktop graphics environment available. You want to play a trick, it's right there. The ICCCM got a ton of hate back in the early 90's, but... no one else has an equivalent and people still innovate in the WM space even today.

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themerone ◴[14 Oct 24 15:08 UTC] No.41838252[source]▶

>>41837906 #

X11 is the opposite of simple and hackable. What you are thinking of as "hackable" is actually the result of it having a ton of legacy features that enable users to do neat tricks.

Wayland breaks a lot of these tools because it is so much simpler than X.

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1. ajross ◴[14 Oct 24 15:21 UTC] No.41838359[source]▶

>>41838252 #

Lacking features isn't the same thing as "simpler", Wayland is great, but is very much a subset of the features implemented on an X11 desktop. Wayland doesn't do selections or provide any IPC mechanism of its own, much less something like an ICCCM that allows you to identify/target other users of the desktop and interact with them in a flexible way. In fact as I understand it the linked tool is in fact impossible to write in Wayland.

Again, this isn't the fault of "Wayland", which is just a compositor framework. The complaint is that the ecosystem of "desktop" software which evolved around Wayland is an ad hoc monstrosity that lacks the unified structure that its ancestor had way back in the X11R5 days.

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