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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

Wayland improves:

- 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.

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>Under X11, you are basically running every application with root, always.

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.

> 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.

Such as your screen locker, your terminal with a sudo prompt in it, or your graphical Apt client?

Well, using the typical argument promoting Wayland, just don't use screen locker, gui terminal, or gui apt, and you'll be fine!

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.

> Such as your screen locker, [...] or your graphical Apt client?

No, not if input is grabbed, sorry.

> your terminal with a sudo prompt in it,

Pinentry&co are mainstream for a number of years.

That’s true, but doesn’t solve the underlying issue of X11 security. You can patch some individual holes, but you can’t fix X11 to actually be properly isolated and secure (especially as that’d make compositors and DEs impossible to use).

> Now why does wayland break xclip and vnc?

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.

It does, because it explains why this change has to be done by VNC client/server devs, and can’t be done in the wayland protocol or compositor.

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.

No, it doesn't. What matters is that xclip and vnc aren't broken on Wayland. I mean, xclip is, but it's called xclip for a reason. The use-case is not broken, and is fulfilled instead by a tool called wl-clipboard.

I wish I had the problem of having multiple monitors connected to one computer or (any of) them having too high resolution wrt. physical size! That said, thanks for reminding that all processes listening (potentially) to all events on X11. Switched now to Ubuntu's flavor of Wayland, let's see how that goes.

(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.)

>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.

XTerm has a secure mode, which even locks the keyboard.

That's because PCs aren't phones and the software run on PCs does not attack the user. This is different from phones where the user is the product to be sold and almost all software is antagonistic but it doesn't apply to the linux desktop, yet.

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.

> but it doesn't apply to the linux desktop, yet.

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.

If you don't trust VSCode, then don't use it. Or use vscodium. But if Microsoft wanted to be evil through VS Code, they could already do enough damage by just sending your projects to them, I would imagine.

It's not a question of trust, vulnerabilities can happen to anyone. Even if the devs at Microsoft were perfect (they aren't), all it takes is an rce in one of the libraries vscode depends on. (Like Chromium, which has happened before [0])

[0] https://www.electronjs.org/blog/chromium-rce-vulnerability

So what's the remote login or rendering solution for Wayland? I don't really care about security or efficiency or whatever, I just want something that works.

"Wayland forwarding": https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

VNC: https://github.com/any1/wayvnc

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