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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

The biggest beef I have with wayland is it's security model. Ok, you don't want to let other applications listen to keystrokes, record the screen, etc, by default? Fine. There should be some low level implementation that pops up a box asking the user if they wish to allow that app to do that, not outright breaking the practice!

Wayland feels like some ivy tower academic's ideal of what a display system should be. Everything usable is an 'exercise left to the reader'.

Look, if you're a dev working on an open source project meant to replace a critical piece of infrastructure, don't be surprised when people don't like or adopt it when it breaks a lot of their uses cases.

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I was really hoping Wayland would be a bit like a programming language in that aspect. I.e. in a programming you have the language itself, the stdlib, and then the ability to load whatever other library you want. In Wayland you have Wayland itself and the ability to load whatever other stuff you want. For core use cases like screen sharing this approach has been an absolute pain. I get not wanting to specify screen sharing as part of Wayland itself but that doesn't mean throwing it to the crowd was a good answer.

>There should be some low level implementation that pops up a box asking the user if they wish to allow that app to do that

I'm not sure what you mean. This is actually exactly what is being done in GNOME and KDE's wayland implementations.

There should be some base implementation of wayland (wlroots?), and this sort of thing should happen there.

I just disagree with the whole concept that a desktop environment, window manager, or whatever else has to change because the underlying display server changes. That should be fully transparent. It seems to me that these guys have handed way too much off to the desktop / window manager, washed their hands of it and said 'deal with it'.

In wlroots they probably won't implement it because that requires a GUI toolkit and they don't want to depend on any particular toolkit.

The push behind wayland happened specifically because the desktop environments wanted to implement their own display server, and it was becoming problematic to try to make it happen transparently. It's actually somewhat of the reverse of what you're saying, desktop environments can only wash their hands of things and push them off to the X server for so long before it becomes untenable.

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