I think it was the "security" argument. Some magic words like "security" and "protect the children" make most people go insane, abandon all reason.
I think it was the "security" argument. Some magic words like "security" and "protect the children" make most people go insane, abandon all reason.
You'll excuse me if I am not terribly enthusiastic about breaking all sorts of functionality to solve a security problem I've never experienced in my 25 years on linux.
Exactly. It's hard to be enthusiastic about something which breaks a lot of stuff I rely on daily, when the benefit is that it fixes problems I've never had.
My theory about the motivation behind the extra security is that it's largely driven by corporations wanting to make desktop Linux less free and less open, and normalize proprietary software instead of open-source. Because profit. Proprietary software is inherently not trustworthy, so the execution environment needs extra security and restrictions, and must be generally less powerful to reduce the damage it can do. Essentially, proprietary software needs the same precautions as malware. So the corps needed to "androidify" desktop Linux. Hence the change from curated distro package repositories to corporate app stores, and the reason why there's so much money pushing to replace X11 with Wayland.
In an open-source ecosystem, users and developers are one and the same, or at least on the same "side", cooperating with each other to make tools which work as well as possible for everyone. Each big program tends to be a collaborative effort where a lot of people contribute to make things better for everyone. Things mostly "just work" and people can typically trust their computers not to do anything weird or hostile.
Very different than a proprietary commercial ecosystem, where users and developers have more of an adversarial relationship. Each program tends to be created in a closed silo by one person or a relatively small team, and is designed primarily to extract money from users, with all other concerns being secondary. It is very common for profit-driven developers to engage in deceptive practices, or do things the user doesn't want, like showing advertisements, collecting and selling data, sabotaging products from competitors, using the device as a node in a botnet or secret compute farm, forcing unwanted updates, microtransactions or subscription fees, etc. So nothing can be trusted, and the entire system needs extensive protections against every type of misbehavior imaginable... even if that means reducing the power and features available to the user.
I've really enjoyed the past few decades of living entirely in the open-source world, where those problems pretty much just don't exist. But with corps pushing the androidification of desktop Linux, I fear those days may be coming to an end.
Xorg's security (and X11 in general) is objectively terrible - this is not even a debatable question.
It is, but my argument is that better security is not needed! There is only one user. All apps are his/hers.
Linux security inside a user's session is bad in general. It all started in the '90s from the principle that all installed software is FOSS, sources inspected, and compiled distro packages trusted.
So why make the GUI secure if everything else isn't? If anyone wants to have better security (or privacy) in Linux, would have to start with the basic permissions model.Great, so let wayland be a hardened option for those who care.
It is and you're free to use X if you want
IMO the issue is that the same group stewarding Wayland was also xorg, and intentionally stifled improvement on xorg even when the work just a matter of merging the PR.
Merging a PR by drive-by contributors is far from trivial. As the maintainer, you become responsible for the other person's code for all eternity; it's on you to read it, understand it, update it when stuff around it changes, and fix it when it breaks.
Not a problem for obviously-correct changes of a couple of lines, but most PRs aren't like that.
I understand and that's a fair point. I should have phrased that differently, in that the PRs for features were waiting to be merged. I'm sure merging into a codebase as... storied? as xorg is no small task.
>and intentionally stifled improvement on xorg
Open source developers are not required to spend their time prioritizing your priorities. You just have to look to Xlibre to see that a lot of contributions are quite bad quality, and in a C codebase of Xorg's complexity and security profile it's not a small job to review things.
Nothing I said in any way implied that freedesktop should be required to do anything. I can't speak to the quality of xlibre merges, only that if whatever is going on over there led to improvements in xorg after a drought, that's a good thing.
If wayland had been sold as a hardened display for those who needed that level of security, I would not have a problem with it.
As it is, the community got constantly browbeat with 'this is the future' and 'it's so much faster!' when recent benchmarks have proven that to be false.
Then go use X. Nobody's stopping you, you can just ignore any brow beating. /ignore is a useful IRC command.
You'll probably find it to be a not great experience, since almost all the people who spend their time actually working on graphics and GUIs in the Linux world prefer to work on Wayland. So X doesn't get much love these days (and you're not entitled to their efforts after all). But it's not like they erased all the old X code from existence.
> You'll probably find it to be a not great experience
I'm confused where I'm likely to be suffering. If I start using Wayland tomorrow would I even notice? Apart from having to switch DEs, of course.
Are you seriously acting like every application having full access over other applications is not an actual security issue?
It is for netflix, or the cloud image storage provider that wants to secure against the consumer easily extracting data and going to someone else. The user being able to easily take a program made by a third party and have it completely rearrange the guts of any other program is the basis of consumer security in a world without a unified government keeping commercial interests at bay.
It is, but nothing can be done about it. That's how Linux permissions work. Any app running as me can execute any other app I have permissions to run. It can pipe stdin/out/err, trace it, etc. Why should the desktop apps be different?
See my other comment too.