[GTALUG] ftp helper app, and how to screenshot on Ubuntu 21.04? (Mostly, Wayland is Not Fit for Purpose)

[Stewart C. Russell]

Thanks for all the responses. I've mostly got things working, but Hugh's
comment about Wayland being “[c]ompatible for X applications.  Not
users” rings true. It's a horrid thing to dump on users, suddenly
finding that Ctrl-X,C,V no longer work, and familiar apps fail silently.

The main (and most annoying, because it was blocking a password manager
and bank logins I had to do in a hurry) culprit was Firefox. In order
for copy and paste to work, it seems you have to set

    MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

Very oddly, xclip still works. It probably shouldn't. I'm glad it does,
as I've based pbcopy/pbpaste clones (they're a mac thing) on top of it
and they get heavy, heavy usage.

For screenshotting, Gnome Screenshot seems to be what I have to use.
Can't seem to find something for the command line:

* ImageMagick's import (thanks for the suggestion, Mario) doesn't work
with Wayland: "unable to read X window image `root': Resource
temporarily unavailable"

* Wayland's own command line screenshot tool 'grim' doesn't work either:
"wl_registry at 2: error 0: invalid version for global wl_output (4): have
2, wanted 3
 ... compositor doesn't support wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1". This is
coming on for Windows Quality Software usefulness.

I'm also making heavier use of Firefox's Take Screenshot browser action:
hit Ctrl + Shift + S on (almost) any page, and you can save the visible
area, the whole page, or even a block element and it'll copy or save as
you wish.

Having a huge block with desktop sharing: VNC doesn't seem to have
access to the screen at all any more. A pain, because VNC is how I
access most of my remote machines. "ssh -X" is lumpy and painfully slow
under Wayland.

I'm having seemingly random Gnome apps needing

    GDK_BACKEND=x11

or else they'll core dump. But this doesn't happen too often.

I realize a small amount of change is necessary in every upgrade: hey,
I'm still on team "Mouse-over to focus is best, fight me" from my Sun
days, but that was something we lost more than a decade ago. But for me,
this is an equivalent UX change of "alias emacs=vi", and I thought Linux
didn't do open user hostility any more.

cheers,
 Stewart