Task switcher and Wayland

[chimak111]

Kubuntu 21.04 with the backports ppa

I'm probably misunderstanding things but I'll go ahead and ask ...

I assume that Wayland doesn't let windows interact with each other:

so moving the mouse pointer over xterm will get xeyes to "track" the pointer whereas xeyes does nothing when the mouse pointer moves over windows of konsole, dolphin and even firefox

and

kcolorchooser can't select a color on the screen outside its own window in Wayland but can do so just fine in an X11 session

So how does the task switcher (Alt+Tab) work in Wayland? Or, for that matter, if I have windows of a few applications open, how does clicking on an icon in the plasma panel bring the respective window into focus?

[jlittle]

So how does the task switcher (Alt+Tab) work in Wayland?

(not really answering, but continuing in question mode...)
My understanding is that the compositor/window manager (I'm not sure what term is right here), in our case kwin, does have access to everything.

So, to get half decent functionality in Wayland, protocols are evolving that let apps do stuff via the compositor, ("sway" being one, or has something to do with one). Seems to me like a decade late, and that it will be a long time, perhaps another decade, till Wayland is usable by users like me.

[chimak111]

Kubuntu 21.04 with the backports ppa

kcolorchooser can't select a color on the screen outside its own window in Wayland but can do so just fine in an X11 session ...

The fix is to install the Color Picker widget. Works just fine in Wayland!

[chimak111]

(not really answering, but continuing in question mode...)
My understanding is that the compositor/window manager (I'm not sure what term is right here), in our case kwin, does have access to everything.

So, to get half decent functionality in Wayland, protocols are evolving that let apps do stuff via the compositor, ("sway" being one, or has something to do with one). Seems to me like a decade late, and that it will be a long time, perhaps another decade, till Wayland is usable by users like me.

After some more reading, it appears that GNOME's mutter and KDE's kwin are both window manager and compositor whereas sway is purely a window manager (very much like i3 but for Wayland) relying on the "wlroots" library for compositing.

BTW, there's something called KwinFT which, AFAICT, does use wlroots: see https://subdiff.org/blog/2021/wlroots-in-kwinft/. But, from what I understand, KwinFT isn't getting the red carpet: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comment...kwinft/h5qoktr.

[claydoh]

The fix is to install the Color Picker widget. Works just fine in Wayland!

That makes sense, kcolorchooser probably has not added wayland support, the code base is quite old.
In a Wayland session, this means it is running in an x session, ( xwayland), like games and other items that don't work in Wayland do. The program runs, but there is nothing for it to select a color from.