> So what was the screenshot feature of X11?

In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature. Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client.

> Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?

I am not familiar with DE-agnostic "screenshot apps" for Linux, they always seemed more common on other OSes, and I've always used the DE-specific apps (which were the first to support such mechanisms, some of them even using more direct DE-specific private protocols instead of XDG Portals).

But I spent a few seconds googling for general screenshot apps, found Flameshot (which makes sense as a cross-platform app), and it turns out that support for the XDG Portal approach was added to it almost 5 years ago:

https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/1272

And if you peek around the diff, you can tell that KDE/GNOME-specific support, on Wayland - using DBus but not the XDG Portals protocol - already existed, in early 2021, in fact...

https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/commit/a5df852268...

That's the commit that added KDE/GNOME-specific Wayland screenshot support.

8 years ago, in a 3rd-party app!

> Why can't the infrastructure include the user simply allowing the app to continue to have access without a specialized infrastructure of app request (that requires updating the app)?

I'd forgotten that this happened, but for screensharing from a X11 client, someone already went through the trouble of emulating it (on top of the XDG Portals + PipeWire infrastructure):

https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xwaylandvideobridge/

It's only a temporary hack, and it only matters for X11 clients running under XWayland - if an app can run as a native Wayland client, it should have XDG Portals-based implementations of relevant features.

> What's with the downplaying "just" again? Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?

Am I downplaying, or are you describing a vague category of "the best or more popular apps" without giving examples?

I feel like it's too easy for some of this stuff to end up in FUD-like arguments without considering the objective reality (of how far we've come in the past few years etc.).

Anyway, my subjective take is that X11 took a decade or two too long to die, and most (if not all) gripes users might have with Wayland can be traced back to X11 outliving its UNIX Workstation origins and having never been designed as a Personal Computing graphical environment.