The way X11 developers ended up fixing this is by creating Wayland. This way privileged operations (like keylogging, screen capture, etc) require the cooperation and authentication through the display server.
Hey come on man, a locking screen saver is a totally niche application. No demand for that.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/07/xscreensaver-wayland-and-lo...
Which, well, we do. Practically all the X usecases are covered on Wayland systems now. Screen sharing, screen clipping, global hotkeys, file pickers, getting the window title like you said... I can do all of that on KDE, right now, under Wayland.
The proper thing Wayland should've done is waited until Wayland had reached feature parity with X, then released it to the world and started acting like it's the future.
> The proper thing Wayland should've done is waited until Wayland had reached feature parity with X
How on Earth would you expect a fundamental protocol to be developed behind closed doors?! Wtf even.
Yeah but again this fragments the ecosystem massively. If people really wanted flexibility they could've just made it a configure option or something equivalent?
> How on Earth would you expect a fundamental protocol to be developed behind closed doors?! Wtf even.
Your making a pretty big assumption here, aren't you? I never said it had to be developed behind closed doors. It's the "lets just obsolete X11 even though Wayland can't even replicate a quarter of it's functionality right now now now because of security security security" that irritates me. If they had worked on Wayland and obsoleted it once they had reached feature parity, that would be releasing it to the world. Then they would've had far less friction and the transition would've been a lot smoother. Would it have delayed Wayland by maybe a decade? Sure, but I see little issue with that. IMO that probably would've made Wayland even better.
1. Claiming XFree86 evil
2. Forking it as X.org
3. Shortly after all distros finished switching to X.org, declaring it obsolete and announcing wayland
4. stopping any major development on X.org immediately even though it's was the one and only option at the time
5. and channeling all development resources (not only on the display server, but also downstream users like toolkits, DEs etc.) to rewrite their code for a protocol that wasn't even gonna be usable until a 10+ years later
6. Depraving Linux desktop users from 10-15 years of improvements and making Linux graphis stack stuck in 2000s
wasn't hijacking the Linux graphic stack?
I mean had Steve Balmer wanted to sabotage Linux in desktop he couldn't do better
The main mistake FD.o made is that they didn't get consensus on a "Desktop Profile" extension, so all the DEs wound up implementing their own thing. This is still fixable, just very annoying until we have agreement on this shit. I think that's what you meant by "feature parity with X".
[0] Currently, every desktop VR setup has to have two layers of compositors. VR applications have to communicate with a special VR compositor that then draws normal desktop windows with the contents of what should be hitting each eye of the VR display, all so it can pretend to be two normal displays.
An antidote on non desktop use of X: the other day I wanted to show a program on my phone, there are many good ways to do this, but I picked none of them. Instead I had just installed a terminal on the phone and noticed they had an X11 package, So A few minutes later I was the proud owner of an X server on a phone. And you know what... It was pretty great. My gaming system load and temps dashboard were displaying just fine.
Despite using X for many, many years, I had never just sat down and played with a bare X server, I had only dealt with it through the lens of a locked down, encumbered desktop system. It was like having a network attached monitor. From whatever system I was using as a desktop system I could just go "display this on that monitor", in this case a phone. Based on that experience I put a raspberry pi on my TV running a bare unprotected X server because having a network attached monitor rocks.
It's not inherent. If I change to another X DE, I can keep all my other programs and the features they implement.
Are you sure? I looked at that earlier this year for a personal tool I wanted to create and found no way to do it on Wayland (On X, I did it just fine).
I had a long back and forth about this very thing with both Claude and ChatGPT, and neither conversation was fruitful: every option had some dependency (like switching to KDE, or similar).
The deal here is that the only way to fix X11's security issues is by breaking all those types of workflows and forcing application rewrites to implement them in authenticated ways.
So if you are going have to go and break all that stuff, why not fix a crapload of other problems while you are at it?
Calling Wayland "X13" may have avoided a lot of misunderstandings, but it probably would of caused others.
Maybe it's both? There are applications with good reason that need to chose their location themselves, and users who want that type of behavior, so it's definitively not just a security issue.
Maybe, just maybe, some people know what they want, and if they want applications that can put themselves in specific corners, why shouldn't the desktop let the applications do that, if the user is OK with it?
X.org developers, not X11 developers.