To dip my toes into the oncoming clusterpocalypse that is Wayland, I thought I'd try something "simple"... Let's see if there's some way to make XScreenSaver hacks able to grab and manipulate screenshots under XWayland.

Here is what I have learned so far:

• Words mean nothing: a "window manager" is now called a "compositor", and a "graphical desktop environment" is now called a "shell".

• Wayland is not a window system, it is a collection of hundreds or thousands of "extensions" that any given "compositor" (window manager) may or may not implement, à la carte, meaning there are actually dozens or hundreds of "Waylands", and it's amazing that anything works at all.

• There's an "unsupported" protocol called wlr screencopy that takes screenshots, but surprise, Gnome and KDE don't implement it.

• Gnome seem to do it with some dbus thing called "org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot" on which I cannot find any documentation.

• KDE does something else entirely. So does OBS, which maybe uses something called Pipewire, whatever that is.

Anyway, if you wanted to help make XScreenSaver work slightly better, you could do that by writing the smallest possible ANSI C program that can grab a screenshot under Wayland, and document under what circumstances it will fail. Using small words.

Future generations thank you in advance.

Previously, previously, previously.