131–140 of 186 posts
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This is the most surprising part to me.
Despite the volume of end-user complaints I haven't seen any developer stepping up to take over the soon-to-be deprecated X.Org Server or advertising their alternative X implementation.
Even if it remains niche like the various systemd alternatives it seems like a lot of people would be grateful.
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Your prediction is probably right but it highlights what I still find to be a fundamental problem with Wayland. It's something that's very much user-facing, as it affects the behavior of desktop environments and several types of programs. It's also something that developers want because they don't want to write X applications or maintain Xorg itself. The disconnect is developers want Wayland to replace X ASAP, while…
> As a developer, I needed to port a custom Linux system to hardware that only has Wayland drivers and it was a giant pain. Wayland offers no advantage at all for that system but it broke a lot of functionality that relied on X in terms of window placement, etc. FWIW, I've had decent luck running cage ( https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/ ), then on that xwayland, and then just ignoring wayland and running X client…
Still, I can't help but be somewhat unhappy about how the forced use of Wayland resulted in a fair amount of work, the end result of which was running X clients anyway and trying to pretend Wayland isn't there.
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X was so insecure that wayland maintainers must now work tirelessly to roughly emulate these insecurities such as taking screenshots and sharing their desktop in their new protocol. Don't get me wrong; I don't like X, but if I had it my way we'd all be using Haiku with a Linux or BSD kernel right now.
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Isn't only the transport layer of X insecure? That could be swapped out with another layer. With Wayland you have to use VNC which is fine for local networks, but not for remote ones.
From what I understand, and I’m no expert on this, X pretty much broke application sandboxing. X’s design was inherently insecure in the context of modern OS security practices.
$ ps ax -ouser,args | awk 'NR==1;/X.*:/'
USER COMMAND
_x11 /usr/X11R6/bin/X :0 vt05 -auth /etc/X11/xenodm/authdir/authfiles/A:0-PFzcIG (Xorg)
root X: [priv] (Xorg)I don't know what I'm doing wrong with Wayland. I have a cheap Linux laptop, with built in graphics. And Wayland works perfectly. I can run multiple monitors with one of them rotated. When I tried that with X I got lots of juddery tearing. I can take screenshots and share my screens via video calls. But everyone says it doesn't work due to security. I have fractional scaling and it doesn't seem to burn out my CPU or…
But every time Wayland is mentioned on HN, it's always orange display protocol bad.
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Really? I can’t help but notice that nobody is describing X as if it hasn’t improved since XFree86 in the 90s so perhaps it is possible for technical professionals to update their understanding?
You seem to be seeing a confrontational message where I didn't mean one. Yes I'm sure you could find some old posts complaining about X that would illustrate the same phenomenon. My point is pretty much exactly that. Fast forward the next 5-10 years and we might all be on Wayland but they blew their first impression and that's delaying adoption.
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Outside of using Wayland, do you do much 3D rendering? The symptoms you describe almost sound like a dying 3D graphics card (or 3D graphics card with misconfigured drivers). I wonder if Wayland is requiring the 3D layer to do its compositing and other window engines don't?
My laptop isn't dying, dude. It works perfectly in Windows 11 and X11, including running the latest games.
I feel like the debate between Wayland and X always bring more a general discussion about technology refactoring and modularity. To me be, the big question is not why freedesktop.org or redhat is doing all of this, they're a company and they have their needs. It is why distro maintainers have chosen to adopt those technologies(systemd,Wayland, others?), not that those options are especially bad but to me,but they rea…
Also funny that you say it's about customizability, having a bunch of implementations of the wayland standard seems more customizable than having the one X server.
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Yup, plays everything just fine - on both laptop and external screen.
you might be playing tricks with us...vlc is known to be broken with wayland...if your being honest consider yourself lucky
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The thing is a 'day 1' feature everyone hacks back in is clipboard sharing and screen share, each of which remove a decent chunk of these protections. Each essentially grants access to another apps data. Plus the attack angle is someone having permission to execute apps on your machine, there's plenty of other nasty things they could do.
> Plus the attack angle is someone having permission to execute apps on your machine, there's plenty of other nasty things they could do. No, the attack angle is either a untrusted app running in a sandbox (fatpak, snap or crosvm or qemu with wayland passtrough[1]) with only a connection to the compositor or a trusted app running in a sandbox getting exploited, any apps handling foreign data is suspect here (Web brow…
Agreed. This debate is particularly frustrating because X11 vulnerabilities get brought up as an excuse for ignoring other sandboxing efforts, and then Wayland gets dismissed because of vulnerabilities when not using other sandboxing methods. You can't win!
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Even if I'm giving my web browser full access to my computer, there are apps I want to sandbox without running them in a full VM. And there are multiple parts to this puzzle to get better security and sandboxing, but those sandboxing efforts don't work if I can't secure the most basic parts of the visual desktop. If someone is demanding perfect sandboxing before we start looking at X11, they're going to be waiting a long time because there is a limit to how much progress we can make in this area while X11 stays dominant.
And okay, sure, we're setting up clipboard access for web browsers, but I can turn that off. And then I can take advantage of flatpak, snap, qemu, whatever and I can at least get closer to actual sandboxing controls, even for non-malicious apps. And I can do partial sandboxing, which is also a good thing -- the idea that everything needs to be either fully separated from each other or have full permissions is just not a good approach to security, sometimes we partially trust things.
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Linux security is like we're in a boat with multiple holes that are taking in water, and whenever anybody tries to plug one of the holes, critics jump out and say, "what's the point, if someone can execute apps on your machine, there's plenty of other nasty things they could do." And so you move to the other hole and somebody says, "what's the point, attackers can just record your desktop." There are multiple holes on the ship, let's start patching them.
Getting better sandboxing controls into Linux is something that is going to take time and that means we're going to be patching holes while other holes exist that we haven't gotten around to yet. There is a limit to what tools like Bubblewrap can do for a graphical app if it's hooked up to X11. And yeah, I want clipboard controls for my web browser, but also I run more apps on my computer than just a web browser, and different apps have different problems. It's not even just about exploits or malicious apps entirely, sandboxing is useful even just for setting up temporary builds or dealing with buggy code and the fact that we don't have perfect solutions shouldn't be an excuse to not improve the situation at all.