Linux

Oh it’s because the protocol forbids apps accessing the output of other apps without special support for it, so unless apps manually include support for Wayland, it will not work.

It's no more special than what they had to do to support X...

With many apps that don’t even do anything related to screenshotting or overlays - like Guake - it still does not work.

Actually guake already works perfectly.

So most of my usual workflow is just broken by Wayland, productivity utterly shattered by some middleware crap and for what? Why?

Security, proper rendering, mixed refresh rate displays, color management, HDR, no more insane hacks, I could go on. Also, you can't actually name a way in which your productivity is actually affected.

Why? Why must the graphical protocol of all things break random software incl. accessibility, overlays etc.? No other OS has ever had this issue. No other OS finds it a security concern to allow apps to see other apps.

Other OS's DO have this issue, you have no idea the things macos has enforced, and we have backwards compatibility using xwayland, being forced to update to a new standard IS normal for operating systems, linux just delayed it for as long as possible. The problems with X11 are MUCH more vast than the problems other operating systems have.

The only reason Wayland does is because it’s just terribly designed from its very conception despite the constant warnings from other Devs and users.

Name one actual problem with the design.

Oh and then there’s the Nvidia driver support…

That's 100% nvidia's fault and almost completely resolved

Look at what they did with PulseAudio - now that’s the right way to do it, users don’t even know the difference except suddenly everything just works a bit better.

That wouldn't have worked with X11 at all, because x11 is so fundamentally broken that making a successor to X is completely actually impossible, there's a reason all the X11 devs which you believe are so brilliant for making x11 decided to switch to developing wayland, and decided that what you want is actually completely impossible while making an actually well designed desktop. Please actually look into the history of this. The people who actually know how X11 works, refuse to work on it, and for very good reason. If what you were saying was true, there would be an X12 project in the works... but there is not, because it is fundamentally awful.

Ye I know that, this isn’t the own you think it is as the GNOME Devs lost their mind long ago in many other ways as well.

It's also the default on KDE now, also, I don't understand why you seem to believe they should've rushed this out, what they did was correct, x11 wasn't going anywhere, you can still use X11, the point of wayland was to redesign things from the ground up to be as perfect as possible, and they're (slowly) achieving exactly that.

Use x11 if any of your usecases aren't met by wayland, it's not like they deleted it. But wayland is the future. They were right to make it partially non-backwards compatible, they needed to restart from scratch.