[suby]

I also think it's unfortunate that Talon is closed source. You see this even in the support practices adopted, where all support is routed through a slack chatroom which doesn't let you view history older than I want to say a few months but might be wrong on the length of time. The author seems to want to force all support requests to go directly through him, presumably because it increases his income if he can create a direct connection with his users.

He's created an incredible piece of software, and that's entirely within his prerogative to do this, especially because him being able to work on it full time leads to more work going into the system. He's made the world a better place so I'm not trying to criticize too harshly. But it's also super unfortunate right, because now if I run into an issue with Talon I am unlikely to find a search result of someone else who has solved it, but rather I have to interact with the creator of the software in a silo'd manner that will not be useful to anyone else other than me.

Tthreatening to remove x11 support entirely (as the article alleges) is also unhinged, yes. We're in a situation in which the best accessibility software is being threatened to be removed from a working platform because the author is (justifiably) frustrated with support requests that he cannot fix because of the transition to Wayland.

I expect that sooner or later we're going to get a better solution to accessibility than Talon, I'm not sure exactly how but probably using local LLM's in a heavy way.

[lunixbochs]

Hi, I'm the developer of Talon.

It's possible to do the simple compositor specific hacks from Talon's scripting system to give yourself partial Wayland support at roughly the quality I'd be able to provide myself, and I know of a couple efforts to do this.

The tentative plan for "dropping support for X11" is just to do one more public Linux X11 release, stop there, leave it available to download, and make it very clear what to expect when you download for Linux or run on Wayland. I plan to continue supporting X11 on the paid version indefinitely.

Most requests relating to Wayland on the Slack have not been offers to help, and way too many have ended up being unpleasant conversations.

I have a standing offer to reconsider my stance if someone can show the vast majority of the necessary APIs are available and well supported without compositor specific hacks.

For some of the other points above, consider me disappointed but not surprised.

[buovjaga]

A KDE developer commented: https://nocoffei.com/?p=451#comment-736

Quote:

>As a community, gather together, and successfully implement the entire API surface needed for Talon on GNOME, KDE, and wlroots,

Can you help find where we can work out this list?

An all or nothing probably isn’t going to work, but we can chip away at this.

There are definitely people who want to help.

[rendaw]

This seems like it basically confirms ggp's complaints: You're not interested in addressing customers' needs, or giving them ways to address their needs themselves, and are instead taking a "if this doesn't meet my standards you're not allowed to do it" standpoint.

If slack interactions are so unpleasant, why do you direct all support through it?

Is there no way you could say "yes this is a hack, but we'll live with it for now until an actually good solution is available"? Maybe it could be added in such a way that it's easy to remove later (abstraction, encapsulation)?

[lunixbochs]

I don't think any of your points reflect what I was trying to communicate.

> You're not interested in addressing customers' needs

I would love to support Wayland, but it is my position that it is impossible to "support Wayland" for Talon. I can only support a subset of the features and only on specific compositors, and it would be a lot of work.

> or giving them ways to address their needs themselves

As I said at the top of the message you are replying to, I believe today users already have the tools to address their needs themselves with about the same level of jank I'd be able to provide on Wayland. If this is a veiled hard line on open source being the only way for users to address their needs themselves, we have a philosophical difference that won't be sorted out in this thread.

> If slack interactions are so unpleasant, why do you direct all support through it?

That's a whole new sentence. I was specifically referring to the support requests for Wayland, which in the long tail have been more hostile toward me than is likely warranted.

> "yes this is a hack, but we'll live with it for now until an actually good solution is available"

The hack is switching to X11, which is fully supported, or working around it in your user scripts, which has already been done by some users for their specific environment.

[tosti]

Do you have your logic inverted? Wayland is taking away accessibility. You can't blame any isv for that.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

And why should he be?

He provided a working version for Linux, he will continue to provide a version for Linux.

Wayland is deliberately sabotaging the Linux desktop by forcing it's way in, developers have their own time and schedule and do not appreciate being forced to throw out working code just because others want to reinvent the wheel. If Wayland did it right they had proper backward compatibility and none of this breakage would happen

[suby]

Hi Lunixbochs, thank you for the comment. One of my take aways from the article was that you were considering removing the ability for Talon to work on x11 in the future. I appreciate the correction. I understand that you're dealing with a lot of unpleasant support requests (especially because people who have to use Talon are probably frustrated at having lost the ability to use their machine normally). I am sorry if I added to that, I do genuinely think you've made the world a better place.

[lunixbochs]

Thank you.