I’m a bit confused here. One of Wayland’s advantages is to isolate clients better. For example, on X11, any client can read the screen and, thus, possibly sensitive data. That really isn’t too great.

But one valid use case of this X11 “feature” is to make screenshots.

To make screenshots work on Wayland, this protocol exists:

https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1

What I would have expected is that, when I run a screenshot tool (e.g., grim), the compositor asks me: “Hey, that program wants to make a screenshot, is that OK?” (That might be a bit annoying, but it’s the only way I can think of to avoid programs silently taking screenshots in the background.)

What happens instead is that grim just makes a screenshot, just like on X11.

I searched the bug trackers of some compositors (labwc, sway, hyperland), but couldn’t find any discussions about this.

Aren’t we almost back to square one now … ? The only advantage is that compositors now could ask, because there’s a well-defined protocol. But in practice they don’t. Hm.

cc @mckinley@mckinley.cc since you seem to have some more experience with Wayland.

I’ve been using Grim to take my screenshots on Sway since I started using it in April 2022 and I don’t recall giving it explicit permission to do so. This issue suggests Sway doesn’t yet support restricting screencopy.