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Comment by hyperman1 | Hacker News Reader

A big problem for me is that wayland promotes a vision of computing that is basically a hellscape.

Wayland supports apps that are basically untrustworthy. Apps can talk to wayland, but not too much to each others, certainly not in ways not envisioned by wayland. The desktop is a huge melee of backstabbing bastards, each shovelling as much user data as possible to their vendor.

The X view of the world is one of trustworthy cooperation. A bit naive, a festival for crapware, but also a way to unlock unexpected possibilities.

I'd rather see a cooperative, creative future where bad apples are weeded out by social mechanisms, even if it means an occasional malware victim. But understandably the IBMs of this world would rather see rows and rows of easily swappable locked down minions for their workstations, and they are the ones paying.

I fear the bureaucratic stagnation that will unavoidably follow from wayland as it is now.

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If apps want to opt into cooperation then they can via other means. Unix sockets come to mind. Wayland also has established ways to opt into common cooperation demands for those apps which want to.

Cooperating via a display server seem like the wrong way for ferrying arbitrary data across processes to me.

I mostly agree with the technical concern of using the display server for ferrying data. But that's just that: a technical concern. It gives raise to android, where apps do not cooperate except to exchange ad network tracker ids.

Where we disagree is the concern that it is an app that should decide who can communicate with it. No. My desktop, my decision. This is a political concern about ownership and what it means.

It is also part of freedom of end users to macgiver their desktop as they see fit. It unlocks e.g. unexpected accessibility and workflow benefits, unforseen to the authors of the app. These experimental setups learn us better ways, after which, a professionalization and real interface can happen if enough users want it. I fear we will loose these experiments with wayland's portals.

My point was not that you can decide or not, it was that the existing behavior has been abused for purposes beyond its scope. That is to blame for these problems, not Wayland.

That X11 compatibility protocol repo isn't the worst idea, but we'll probably find that the core and extension protocols will cover everything - in a purposefully designed way - in the long run anyway.

You could say the same about memory protection and isolation, and yet, here we are.

I do somewhat sympathise with the sentiment that running untrusted apps is bad and FLOSS ecosystems are good. But even then, building a security framework around windowing does seem appropriate given the broad range of uses that Wayland will see.

> You could say the same about memory protection and isolation, and yet, here we are.

While it also serves as a security mechanism the most important benefit of memory protection is that it protects against processes *accidentally* corrupting other processes due to mistakes, invalid pointers, etc.

If you want to intentionally mess with other processes memory most OS give you the means to do it in a controlled way, with ptrace in Linux or WriteProcessMemory in Windows, because sometimes it is a useful thing to do.

The problem with Wayland is that they veto useful features they aren't interested in (that admittedly if misused could be a security problem or at least a nuisance) and they don't give any alternative way of doing them, choosing instead to punt the problem downstream to the compositors, who will each do them (or not) in a different way making the whole thing a mess.

I think this is interesting take. But I consider GNU Linux on desktop to be currently "weeded out by social mechanisms".

Conversely the locked & secured Linux platforms - Android and SteamOS are currently a festival for crapware.

In those, the social mechanism is removed, replacing users as the object with commerce. There is no user consortium, no committees on behalf of users, no form of governance other than a single vendor for either platform.

Wayland was unilateral. It wasn't a choice by users, but by companies.

Free Linux distributions are controlled by companies or by unpaid developers (or both), and they have decided that Wayland is a way forward, even when the whole UI platform is not yet ready. The only thing user can do in this environment is to choose different distro or create new one and see what it means to support X.

If you are not paying for it, you become eternal alpha/beta tester.

Retroactively adding security to a system where security was not a design goal is hard, so I can understand why Wayland chose to also cover those use cases.

In the Desktop Linux ecosystem the added 'security' by Wayland is indeed marginal when every app can access the whole filesystem.

> In the Desktop Linux ecosystem the added 'security' by Wayland is indeed marginal when every app can access the whole filesystem.

That's no longer the case with flatpak apps, which are gradually becoming more popular; some of them might still have access to the whole filesystem, but most of them are limited to sharing nothing or at most a couple of specific directories.

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