I'm really tired of this Wayland horseshit. If there was an actual reason for users to use it, fine, but instead it breaks forwarding and vnc and xclip, and for what exactly? Why should I upgrade?
- Multi-Monitor support (especially with multiple different resolutions)
- HiDPI support (even if some of your programs haven’t been updated for that yet)
Now why does wayland break xclip and vnc? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless.
Under X11, basically every application you run can trivially escalate itself to root. As even your Zoom client can just listen to your key events when you unlock your screen or use sudo in your terminal, save your password, and tada it can elevate itself. Under X11, there is no security whatsoever, and no separation of privileges.
edit: I completely agree about "electron applications". Those are not native applications on linux, those are badly made backdoors using browser runtimes. I do not run them and I strongly recommend to my family, friends, and peers not to run them.
Microsoft has VSCode, Skype and Teams on linux, Zoom has a native linux client.
With modern electron apps, often even being able to be updated remotely, you have to start treating more and more software as hostile as well.
That said, even if you’d only have trustful software, you should still sandbox it, as if there’d be an RCE in a chat client you wouldn’t want the attacker to be able to elevate itself to root.
[0] https://www.electronjs.org/blog/chromium-rce-vulnerability
This is not even remotely true. You are able to snoop on events that use the X server - typically programs run as your user or programs that you have chosen to forward to your X server.
You are correct that the X server gets all events from all clients and therefore can log keys.
Such as your screen locker, your terminal with a sudo prompt in it, or your graphical Apt client?
That being said, I've been using Wayland for 2 years, and it's mostly just worked, and worked better than Xorg for many things. Unfortunately I often have to switch back to X for specific applications, but luckily Ubuntu has made that fairly painless. There are pros and cons; the arguments for and against Wayland don't really add much to the conversation, which is sort of an odd state to be in.
No, not if input is grabbed, sorry.
> your terminal with a sudo prompt in it,
Pinentry&co are mainstream for a number of years.
Does it matter why? If I use VNC to do my work, it is absolutely impossible for me to switch to wayland, no matter how justified the reasons are.
If a new replacement would have the exact same set of supported use cases as the original, it wouldn’t be useful. The point of wayland is that it enables some new use cases, while restricting some older ones.
Wayland is still powerful enough to implement VNC (weston supports RDP in both directions) or xclip (KDE’s klipper works just fine under wayland). It just requires effort from third parties.
XTerm has a secure mode, which even locks the keyboard.
(Last time I tried Wayland, it was because an update changed the default to it, without me noticing. Something important to me was then broken, and I had to switch back to Xorg, manually. That left a bad taste in mouth.)
Wayland still have bugs, but as Drew DeVault writes: They are fixable and importantly there are people willing to work on Wayland.
One of the more pressing issue currently is the Nvidia drivers, but that's not the fault of the Wayland developers. Users need to complain to Nvidia about that.