Sadly Sway is bound to wayland.
The argument raised against this is that it should be used in conjunction with some measure of a sandboxing technique, and that X11 is “impossible to sandbox”, but X11 sandboxes exist: how they work is a proxy server that sits in between the sandboxed application and the real server that determines what to let through and what not, the sandboxed application thus believes it is the only thing running inside of it's own X11 server, which maps it onto the bigger one.
Then the counter argument is that that “doesn't count” and isn't “true sandboxing”, but that is the exact same technique that sandboxes that use Wayland use for say DBus, or PulseAudio, and has always been the standard way of sandboxing such daemons and servers.
That's always the highly theoretical argument that comes in to defend these promises that are false on a practical level “it doesn't count”, even though the practical result is the same.
All the ways to circumvent Wayland's security “don't count” even though they can all the same be used to compromise it.
I am quite convinced after having spoken with many a Wayland developer that nigh none of them actually care about the “security” they so often talk about: they care about a certain theoretical elegance of a “secure system" that only exists in theory but exists in no reality as something that actually has been practically realized. All the actual, effective, real world ways to pierce it are wished away with that they “don't count” as they don't exist in their theoretical dream world.
I have seen multiple such arguments that you can “sandbox” X11 access, with no proof or really bad compromises; I don’t believe it.
I addressed this in my very post and forgot no such thing.
Firejail can and does sandbox X11.
> I have seen multiple such arguments that you can “sandbox” X11 access, with no proof or really bad compromises; I don’t believe it.
How is there no proof? it exists in Firejail at this moment..
The compromises are those which one has to live with on Wayland per sē: naturally things that need access don't work, and Nvidia card acceleration does not work.
https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/x11-guide/
This existed and happened long ere Wayland was even conceived.
I consider having to use a nested X server, even one capable of forwarding, a huge compromise based on my experience with it.
Anyway, that did not exist before Wayland was even conceived. First of all, hardware acceleration in Xpra has been a relatively rocky story for a long time. Second of all, Firejail didn’t support using it until 2016.
If you want to keep buying borderline Linux-incompatible video cards and running an unmaintained display server, by all means try to jam a security model onto an inherently insecure client-server system to help justify it. As cold as it may be, the world will happily leave you behind. And if you don’t believe me, just keep waiting. Lots of people thought Macromedia Flash would stick around forever, too.
As in, a form of sandboxing.
> which are complicated
They are no more complicated than every other proxied daemon, as my original post very much explained.
> and often buggy.
Then I'm sure you can provide me with such a bug.
> Last I checked Firejail itself only recommended using X11 sandboxing when dealing with hostile situations.
Then I'm sure you can cite this recommendation.
> I consider having to use a nested X server, even one capable of forwarding, a huge compromise based on my experience with it.
I'm sure that you can come with an actual concrete example of a problem, because when I used it it simply appears as if the application normally ran in it's Window, and I would not be able to tell the difference had I not known.
> Anyway, that did not exist before Wayland was even conceived. First of all, hardware acceleration in Xpra has been a relatively rocky story for a long time. Second of all, Firejail didn’t support using it until 2016.
The first Firejail beta releases itself was in 2014, long after Wayland was first conceived.
The first Xpra release was in 2008, however.
> If you want to keep buying borderline Linux-incompatible video cards and running an unmaintained display server, by all means try to jam a security model onto an inherently insecure client-server system to help justify it. As cold as it may be, the world will happily leave you behind. And if you don’t believe me, just keep waiting. Lots of people thought Macromedia Flash would stick around forever, too.
I'm sure you'll tell the next man that proved you wrong that you “never saw proof” as well, and he will provide proof too, which you will just as dismiss with vague arguments of “It's buggy and a huge compromise, but I won't provide any specifics on which bugs, and which compromises.”
People that actually think that Wayland is the “future” that will replace X11 with this constant “features that many users need are insecure and they really don't need them.” are a laughter. As of this moment most user interfaces haven't even tried an attempt to make a Wayland port and aren't interested; the only noteable ports are KDE, GNOME, Sway, and Enlightenment, two of which had to add back many of the cut features to make their system work, but had to do so in incompatible, nonstandardized ways.
It must have been around 2013 when I first heard talk about how Wayland was ready and would leave X11 behind, and adoption hasn't increased much since then.
Well, there's ydotool for Wayland, but unfortunately it doesn't even have half the features of xdotool, and probably won't be improving much any time soon, since its README says "Since Jun, 2019, I have little time to maintain this project".
At this rate, it'll probably take another 10 or 20 years for Wayland to catch up to all the already-existing useful features of X.