Wayland support? [Donation target met]

[JaneSmith]

Added by one of the maintainers of Barrier, @p12tic:

Please support this bounty to get Wayland support in Barrier

A bounty for Wayland support has been posted to BountySource here. EDIT: $2550.42 has been collected, thus meeting the goal of $2000, but not the goal of $5000.

As promised here, I @p12tic will start working on Wayland support within 3 months of the moment when $2000 is collected. I will start working on this feature immediately as soon as $5000 is collected. The higher amount is collected, the higher priority this will be given.

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Original issue

Is there any work being done to support Wayland?

The README file states "We will also have our eye on Wayland when the time comes", but to me the time has already long come and past. Distros ship Wayland by default now. Desktop environments like KDE have a feature freeze in place for X, with all focus being on Wayland now. New WMs/DEs are being made for Wayland only (e.g. Sway and Way Cooler). The upcoming Librem 5 phone will be running Wayland only. It's all full steam ahead with Wayland on Linux.

Synergy has been promising Wayland support literally for years. Their last comment was that it was "coming soon", almost a year ago. They seem to have nothing to show it and even locked the threads discussing the issue. They're advertising a paid product supporting Linux, when in fact it doesn't at all if you're using modern Wayland. This seems like false advertising. There are other issues with Synergy, such as encryption being a paid feature, the feature creep, etc. Therefore I'm looking to Barrier instead.

So can we get Wayland support with Barrier? Is it technically possible to implement? I am aware that Wayland's limited feature set and increased security could possibly cause problems. Could we get an actual discussion going about this? Or a status update? Thanks a lot in advance.

[p12tic]

Hey, Barrier does not currently support Wayland. It should be technically possible, but for that to happen someone needs step up, investigate and implement that. Barrier is a community-driven project, there's no one to complain to and doing so might be counter-productive :-)

Like in all similar projects, a particular feature is usually implemented when some user who is a skilled programmer gets fed up and spends several weekends working on it.

[walker0643]

I don't have the time to invest into Wayland development. At least, not as much as would be required to lead it. I would, however, be willing to dedicate a branch for this purpose if there were sufficient developer interest.

[walker0643]

Reopen if a dev wants to tackle a wayland branch.

[BrendanBall]

Would we be able to implement Linux support with uinput so that there's just a single implementation needed? FreeBSD does seem to have uinput as well, all though there doesn't seem to be much documentation around it.

[chriselrod]

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly

X.Org is going into maintenance mode in favor of Wayland. Seems like we may need Wayland support eventually.

[valpackett]

FreeBSD does seem to have uinput as well

Indeed we do :) It only works for GUI, but it's not like the current X implementation can type into the plain console.

BTW, https://github.com/Blub/netevent is a good uinput forwarder. Not smoothly moving the mouse across devices, just toggles between devices based on a key, but still works nicely.

[frague59]

+1 for netevent

[kayasoze]

All mainstream Linux distributions now default to Wayland on GNOME. This would seem to be a high priority.

[BrendanBall]

I've already started playing with uinput, but I'm currently stuck on getting mouse movements to work because they're absolute, not relative. I haven't looked much at netevent, but I would assume it uses relative mouse events because it doesn't need a smooth crossover from one machine to another. I've only tested so far in Xorg because my barrier server is still on i3, where my barrier client is on sway. Uinput should be universal, so it should work in both Xorg and Wayland, but I should probably just check if the absolute mouse events are also broken in Wayland. If it's not possible to get absolute mouse movements to work through uinput then it's kind of a dead end.

[AdrianKoshka]

Thanks for the effort you're putting in @BrendanBall! As for @kayasoze, developer resources need to be diverted to more pressing issues right now like memory leakage. And keep in mind, there's currently not many active developers on the project. We have a lot of users, but not many developers. While wayland support would be appreciated, I think fixing more pressing issues is of higher priority.