1 - Oh, yes of course Wayland could support all these things, but that's not terribly interesting. It's like a programming language with an inadequate standard library: It keeps the core language lean and flexible, while ensuring that the ecosystem will remain fragmented and anyone trying to do normal work will forever have an uphill slog to get anywhere. In practice, in 2025, there are 3 incompatible ways to take screenshots in Wayland (the GNOME way, the wlroots way, and the KDE way that supposedly will get combine with wlroots real soon now), and we're just now starting to get to the point where theoretically the APIs exist to do a11y but the practical side isn't there yet.

2 -

> This isn't a project with full time employees like at your job, it's a distributed open source effort.

It's not a hobby project, either. AFAICT, Wayland has always been predominately a corporate project. It's a loose proxy, but https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/graphs/main... matches my impression; started at Red Hat, with lots of help from Intel, Samsung, and Collabora.

The point with 1. isn't that it's interesting that such APIs could be made, it's that a whole bunch of non-sense discourse has flourished because people don't understand what it means that Wayland can't do screen capture.

That said, there is a standard way to capture the screen now, via XDG Desktop Portals + Pipewire. For better or worse, that is the standard that works whether you're on GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, Hyprland, etc.

Anyway, I really feel I said enough regarding the "17 years" thing. I think Wayland definitely was much closer to a hobby project for about half it's life, and while we have some big names investing in it, frankly I doubt the investment in Wayland desktops really compare to pretty much any other commercial windowing systems and probably still nowhere near the effort put into X11 over the years. But regardless, it's not really about that. The point is that the investments made by each party is not unilateral, they all had specific things they were working on. This is very different, IMO, than having a full time team. The closest you will see to that is Red Hat, but Red Hat also doesn't invest in all of the important areas for a full proper desktop.