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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Are there even any distros who still run Xorg as root?

Does it matter? A user account compromise is as good as a root compromise in many desktop configurations given how often people type "sudo" and how much user data is available as, well, user.

>Does it matter?

Yes, because this vulnerability requires a user compromise to pull off.

I agree that it's already game over once someone has access to your user account.

AFAICT ubuntu 22.04 and void uptodate run Xorg as root by default

Same for sddm/lxdm

Wayland is far from mature, even with xorg-xwayland. I personally use it with (fairly uptodate) KDE/Plasma on a Intel Iris Xe Graphics, and still get some annoyances.

I think the comment you're replying to was emphasizing "as root". I can't remember the last time I saw that.

1) I’ve been daily driving Wayland for six years and the only pain I have is that IntelliJ is blurry at 4K

2) Nothing in the parent comment even mentioned Wayland, unless it has been edited- they're saying that people don’t run X.org as root these days (which I am not certain of, since I haven't been running it for so long)

I've been using wayland only forever, I'm not sure what you're missing?

For example: Inter-application communication to allow time-tracking apps, automation, accessibility, and a thousand other use cases. (I can't live without barrier and x over ssh)

Wayland is designed to block this feature. Which means it will always remain a niche, only useful for those running multiple monitors with different refresh rates. And even those people are limited to AMD GPUs. So that's a very small niche of a very small niche.

X over ssh can still work on wayland, there is an app called waypipe that does the same thing.

And KDE just built a screen recorder for Wayland. But why bother rewriting all of these tools, when perfectly good, battle-tested solutions already exist in X? Many software makers are unwilling to rewrite their apps from the ground up just to work on a niche system.

I think the idea is that they want to get rid of X eventually, if or when that happens is anyone's guess.

Yes, they have made that quite clear. I think it is a real shame that so much time has to be given fixing bugs and recreating software that already exists, rather than developing interesting new software on a stable platform.

So bad we abandoned all those great SVN tools and created new tools for git…

It is not designed to block this feature, it just has absolutely nothing to do with a goddamn display protocol. The linux userspace is definitely lacking in many other areas but that is simply due to no unified solution (inherent in bazaar style development), and an insane reliance on C for everything.

I think the needs you listed there would be considered the niche.

Most people just want something to display their windows. Those things are cool, sure, but they probably come at some cost.

Wayland works great, it's just KDEs implementation that leave something to be desired.

If you try other desktops that use Wayland such as Gnome or Sway you will find far fewer issues.

My ubuntu 22.04 LTS (jammy) is running Xorg as root. I have just dist-upgraded since I installed 18.04, so maybe fresh installs don't?

Maybe.

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