State of multi-player Wayland

I've been fascinated by the idea of attaching multiple mice to one computer, and then having multiple mouse cursors inside of one desktop environment!

I just spent three weeks investigating how well that's currently supported on Linux & Wayland. Let me tell you what I found! The results are surprisingly cool.

blinry

It shouldn't come as a surprise, though, that a lot of graphical user interfaces don't really have any affordances for multiple mouse pointers manipulating the same object (e.g. one cursor drags the window, another tries to close it), but the possibilities are really endless here. It's not quite there yet to be considered fully-featured and plug-and-play, but it's a lot more capable than I thought it would be.

The first thing that came to my mind is sitting down behind my computer with my kids to teach them the basics of using a GUI. Instead of having to pass the mouse back and forth, one of my kids (or both!) could have his own cursor, which is a lot more fun and collaborative. Games are obviously another great application for this sort of thing, especially things like classic board games.

I hope this gets some more attention.