xeyes doesn't track mouse pointer unless hovered

[ssg]

I understand this might be a deliberate design decision for performance, but I wanted to add it as a placeholder in case others hit similar issues. Not a breaking scenario or anything in my case.

Environment

Windows build number: 10.0.22000.0
Your Distribution version: Ubuntu but `lsb_release` turns out to be an unknown command
Your WSLg version: 1.0.26

Steps to reproduce

Start xeyes

Expected behavior

xeyes should be able to track mouse movements outside its window.

Actual behavior

xeyes is frozen unless the mouse pointer hovers on it. it works fine as long as the pointers tays inside its window.

[Masamune3210]

Currently any Linux program can only see inside of it's window or windows it owns. Not sure if it is expected to change but it is known

[jspanchu]

This is result of standard wayland security feature and not at all surprising. Wayland windows cannot track information of other windows.
xeyes runs on XWayland and hence, can only snoop on other windows that run with XWayland.
Try launching an X11 window, ex: xclock/chrome/firefox/blender and move your cursor over those windows and watch Xeyes eye roll

See this, this and this

This is the exactly the same behavior on any Linux distro with a wayland compositor (sway, gnome-wayland, plasma-wayland, etc)