[jchw]

On the KDE side, Wayland has been going pretty well. Wayland sessions make up 82% of all sessions with telemetry enabled.

https://blogs.kde.org/2025/03/15/this-week-in-plasma-file-tr...

For me the real conundrum was SwayWM vs KDE Wayland rather than any X.org session; I really felt like SwayWM was a good upgrade from i3wm and gave me a better desktop session with much less hacks. Hope to see wlroots push forward and support some of the newer Wayland protocols, it has started to fall behind a little bit, but I think it's good for alternative desktops.

[OsrsNeedsf2P]

I run Wayland but I'm not happy about it. Most autoclickers still don't work, and autotypers need sudo and group magic to get working.

[jchw]

Root is definitely required to inject inputs at the kernel level using uinput, which I think is what you would hope, ignoring the fact that the typical Linux desktop still has a lot of other low hanging fruit to fix in terms of security.

Anyway though, the "standard" way to do automatic clicking and typing on Wayland is via the RemoteDesktop portal, named such because it is used with ScreenCast to support use cases like VNC and RDP servers. Despite the poor choice of name, it gives a general API for sending inputs programmatically.

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html...

This does require at least a one-time permission grant for an application to use, but at least on KDE it is possible for the permission to persist across runs.

I'm sure everyone is unenthused about having to deal with another way to do things, but it's at least decently straightforward... You could certainly invoke this from a quick Python script I reckon.

(There's also libei but it's kind of a mess imo and I don't know if it is well-supported yet.)

[hpdigidrifter]

I get it's something you need but for the average user autotypers and clickers not working easily without permissions is a definite positive.

It's entirely the point of moving to Wayland for many.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

https://github.com/atx/wtype seems to work for me with no special permissions. (On Sway; I won't comment on other compositors.)

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Wayland sessions make up 82% of all sessions with telemetry enabled.

That is a significant caveat.

[hollerith]

Do you have any reason to believe that Wayland users are more likely than X users to enable telemetry?

[alex-moon]

The reason Wayland users might be more likely to opt into telemetry is because they see Wayland as "developing" and therefore needing that user data for development purposes. I have no idea what the incidence would actually be, but there is certainly a potential selection bias in there.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Nothing solid. It would be entertaining if it were the opposite. But unless we have a really good reason to think we know which way it leans, the unknown unknown means I wouldn't want to trust the numbers.

[jasonjayr]

On a distro with wayland as the default, users are probably defaulting to allowing telemetry as well. (maybe? Just a guess ...)

[jchw]

KDE telemetry is strictly opt-in, it is something that you are prompted for during the first setup wizard.

[Y_Y]

Cool kids don't allow telemetry. I think that any software whose userbase isn't totally oblivious will have severe selection effects if you use data obtained by spying.

[jchw]

If the cool kids are so cool, they should learn to distinguish transparent opt-in telemetry from invasive opt-out telemetry. Unfortunately, being "cool" doesn't get your needs represented, so it's really not always in your best interests to never opt in.