I have a couple of issues with portals. One is that we’re putting too much eggs in the basket of something that is designed for containers. XDG portals Have rejected features that people have requested because they don’t want to expose that functionality to a container and they are allergic to permission prompts apparently.
I also have other issues with the portals for instance video capture. It requires you to have a camera portal. It requires you to have a desktop capture portal. It also requires you to have an app to app, video, portal, which doesn’t exist yet. All of these things require pipewire pretty much in most cases, so why can’t we just have a single pipewire portal? It may not scale well in the future, but it doesn’t scale well now anyways. If you want just a generic pipe wire stream, you’re not gonna be able to have it, you’re going to have to conform to one of the standards anyways. For a case in point example, the OBS pull request for Game Scope Capture is the perfect example of this over reliance in XDG portals.
I’m showcasing this just to highlight the fact that the XDG portals are incredibly poorly thought out, and I don’t think that it’s a reliable method for the future going forwards.
PS. Please pardon any oddities in this, I had to use speech to text, since my RSI is acting up.