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Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue isn't that you downloaded random hostile software, but that other software you do use has some sort of vulnerability (recent Unity vulnerability, browser sandbox escape, etc) and an issue like this would allow for privilege escalation.

Wayland doesn't need X11's vulnerability as its only argument, Wayland is a much simpler design that is easier to iterate on because it doesn't assume the client and server are on different machines. The fact that it moves privileged APIs like screen capture behind portals is a bonus.

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So simple and easy to iterate on that Wayland compositors are still not as full-featured as X11 desktop environments after more then a decade, and can't be due to protocols no one is able to agree to implement.

>> Wayland compositors are still not as full-featured as X11 desktop environments

It depends what features you care about. X11 doesn't have tear-free video playback, HDR, or as good a security model as Wayland.

Using a compositor fixes screen tearing, no need to use Wayland for that.

Even a compositor is unnecessary to fix screen tearing these days: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

>> Using a compositor fixes screen tearing, no need to use Wayland for that.

Right, and that abandons the whole X drawing API in favor of passing around client drawn bitmaps. That was one of the big points of Wayland too - X has a whole bunch of stuff that no modern apps use anyway so lets throw it out and build up a better version of the capabilities we need.

If we abandon the X drawing API and half an OS included (memory management) and use KMS, all that's left is the features that are security holes.

X11 has options for tear free video playback; it's not in the base protocol, and not all drivers offer it, etc, but it's acheivable. Fundamentally, you need to send the next frame to the server and ask it to switch frames during vblank (+/- notification), on today's systems, this is more of a coordination problem than a technical one; there's plenty of video ram to go around to double/tripple buffer.

HDR would fit in the X11 model of many bit depths, however the specifics don't really; afaik, X11 has a maximum bitdepth of 32 for pixel values, which means either limiting to 2-bits of alpha channel or using palettes (I think I saw that indexed colors can be defined with 16-bits per channel). An extension might be possible (with everything that brings), but I think the ship has sailed.

I agree that Wayland's security model prevents some undesirable interactions that X11 allows, but it also prevents or makes difficult some desirable interactions, so it's a mixed bag.

> I agree that Wayland's security model prevents some undesirable interactions that X11 allows, but it also prevents or makes difficult some desirable interactions, so it's a mixed bag.

That is so true, I wanted to have a typing sound from my pc everytime I typed on wayland and I looked at LITERALLY every single solution and none of them worked... simply because of the security model of wayland (so things like Mechvibes and alternatives don't work generally speaking)

On one hand, its a good thing to prevent things like password injection etc. but on the other, really?

I got frustrated and I created a lot of github issues on every such project if they said that they are working on wayland and I didn't care if it meant running it as sudo, I just asked them kindly if there was a way or not/ what's the issue here

There are still times where I get a lot of notifications simply because someone commented on those issues

So naturally a lot of people are/were frustrated about it. Not sure if its a good thing or not, but I 100% agree about this comment of yours

Another big issue imo to me feels like ssh, X servers ssh forwarding/vnc just works, Yet I haven't really found ways to do things like VNC on wayland on a server or something as easy (or even possible?) on wayland as compared to x servers, Please let me know if there are apps which do this though, I know about weston but I haven't found ways to work with it/make it work (maybe my skill issue)

Are there any solutions to these things though? Fundamentally that mechvibes things requires an app to view the key from every other application and make a sound, Nothing stops it from being a key-logger as well if it had that capability and Wayland was created with a better security model but as you say and I experienced, that security model comes up with its own compromises and I am not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing....

With the caveat that I haven't used Wayland ... [1]

Waypipe is supposed to help replace things like remote X. I'd be surprised if there's no vnc server that offers a wayland desktop... that would be a big missed opportunity.

For your noisemaker, I think you might have a better time integrating at another level. Either intercept the inputs before the display server gets them, or integrate into the display server itself. X was more flexible, but as long as it's just typing -> noise, you don't need it to have the same architecture as it did in X.

[1] Wayland has no compelling features for me, and X remains viable for me as well. At some point, hardware support might be compelling, or IMHO, something will come to replace Wayland and X that is compelling.

> Another big issue imo to me feels like ssh, X servers ssh forwarding/vnc just works, Yet I haven't really found ways to do things like VNC on wayland on a server or something as easy (or even possible?) on wayland as compared to x servers,

Yes, this should be workable, assuming your compositor is compatible (a meaningful caveat, but not insurmountable):

* To forward one application like `ssh -X`, you want waypipe

* For VNC, it really depends on your compositor, but wayvnc works for many of them. (And GNOME does their own thing and I think KDE has their own official option)

waypipe just works too. That replaces any reason to do SSH forwarding.

Also some desktop like Gnome (maybe KDE has similar feature?) offer remote desktop. In Gnome's case it is using RDP protocol instead of VNC.

Waypipe[0] for native Wayland applications, and if you need to forward X11 apps there's xwayland-satellite[1].

You can hook xwayland-satellite with Waypipe and forward X11 apps through Waypipe. This way you get even better performance than with traditional X11 forwarding methods.

The other day I was playing Steam/Proton games through the network this way.

Of course, X11 forwarding also works fine on Wayland with ssh -X, but as I said, consider Waypipe + xwayland-satellite.

[0] - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

[1] - https://github.com/Supreeeme/xwayland-satellite

I remember watching tear free HD video in 2011 on a netbook I dug out of the e-waste dumpster in the UC Berkeley CS building basement. Chrome/Openbox/X11. That laptop was literally trash.

Aren't you just doubling down on Wayland being simple? X11 is the kitchen sink here.

What missing features? Xforward?

Wayland is the way to go. The same applies to Flatpak, Pipewire, systemD, etc. I'd say that this is obvious, and doesn't even need to be argued, to 99%+ of those who actually use the Linux desktop. The only opposition to this is a small group of decelerationists with a major, irrational aversion to change.

Everything you listed is bloated, slow, incompatible, unfinished or unstable. My system worked fine 20 years ago on far less capable hardware. Now even with high end workstations systems lag, crash or have strange behavior

Having only two major options, X and Wayland, doesn't mean either one is correct. It is generally true that X needs to be replaced, but Wayland is not necessarily the replacement we need. It would be good to have more competition.

On a separate note, I think it's probably true that Wayland has significant drawbacks that preclude it from being an obvious replacement.

I see wayland as the pulseaudio of display.

Everybody is pushing it and trying to convince the people who have problems with it that it's completely fine and their problems aren't important (like blind people being completely unable to use the computer).

At some point the pipewire of display will come along and we'll all forget wayland was ever a proposed solution.

Man I hope you're right

That's not really how any of this works.

Pulseaudio is both a protocol and also an implementation of that protocol. Pipewire also implements the pulseaudio protocol, hence its compatibility with all existing software.

Wayland is a protocol only. Every compositor - and there are many - implements it "from scratch". The "pipewire of display" would simply be yet another Wayland compositor. No one is going to solve the problems of Wayland in one fell swoop by releasing another Wayland compositor. What is actually happening is that problems are being gradually solved by the introduction of protocol extensions, which usually get adopted by other compositors after achieving success in one.

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