5 ms·

The point is that the X Server is an ancient mess of code held together by duct tape, with countless deprecated APIs. Most login managers don't even let you run

by nwah1 10y ago

The point is that the X Server is an ancient mess of code held together by duct tape, with countless deprecated APIs. Most login managers don't even let you run it rootless, which means the vast majority of desktop users have all this running as root, and rootless X wasn't even possible until very recently... and was motivated by Wayland anyways. So the point of Wayland is to have a clean and simple foundation, with no obvious security vulnerabilities, no overhead, and no kludgey workarounds or ancient APIs.

bandrami 10y ago
Ah, the "throw away decades of bug fixes because This Time We'll Do It Right" temptation. I definitely get that sense from Wayland, which is a reason I'm leaving it alone for several years until it builds up the kind of fixes (a.k.a. "bloat" or "cruft") that make X11 Just Work for me. As far as the user permissions, fair enough, though I personally think hardware access should require root, for the most part.
- cmurf 10y ago
  You think average Joe User needs to be root or an admin capable of using sudo, to format a USB stick, or use a printer already connected to the computer? There is something that a locally logged in user is privileged to do without needing to be or become root. Apple and Microsoft have tossed out their window managers more than once also. X is older than anything they've had.
  - bandrami 10y ago
    You think average Joe User needs to be root or an admin capable of using sudo, to format a USB stick, or use a printer already connected to the computer? I do, yes, which is why I avoid things like PAM and all the various FOO-kits (sadly Slackware has since succumbed to consolekit, which is why I've been moving to OpenBSD). I want to know that anything I do as my user without su or sudo or doas (depending) will not have an impact outside of my home directory. (Though to be clear, I think a display server could conceivably be justified for a dedicated non-root user -- fbterm seems like a good model here: getty hands over the VT to a user who has write access to the framebuffer.)
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  You see, that's the thing: X11 has been stuck in this Groundhog day of people proposing to fix it by making X12, or if they're really ambitious, Y. And it always will be that day. It's never going away.
- majewsky 10y ago
  > I personally think hardware access should require root, for the most part. Well, writing into the home directory requires hardware access, too. Where do you draw the line? In the similar way that the kernel's VFS provides authorized access to storage hardware, the *kits (or nowadays systemd-logind) provide authorized access to video/audio hardware.
  - bandrami 10y ago
    > writing into the home directory requires hardware access, too. It requires access to a filesystem, which may or may not translate to writing to a physical disk, depending on the setup.
zeveb 10y ago
This is classic second-system thinking. 'This time we'll do everything right! This time we'll write it without any bugs!' Yeah, there's a lot to dislike about how X works. It's old, and it shows. But it has had man-centuries of work to get it where it is now; a de novo solution will necessarily need similar levels of work to get to a similar point. What could radically improve a next-generation X replacement would be to use a higher-level language than C, which would remove entire categories of errors as possibilities. I'm thinking either OCaml or Common Lisp could potentially be excellent choices, for very different reasons. But replacing one large, old, battle-tested C project with a large, new, untested C project isn't going to usher in a happy world of simplicity and security.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  > a de novo solution will necessarily need similar levels of work to get to a similar point That work does not need to be directly in the second system. If the hard lessoned were learned in X by making mistakes much effort can be prevented by not making those mistakes and use something closer to the finished design of the first system... which is exactly what Wayland is.
- Frondo 10y ago
  Of course Wayland will have bugs. What it won't have (hopefully) is the same design decisions and flaws that X made, because people have learned from X in the intervening decades since its inception.
  - khedoros 10y ago
    It'll just have different design decisions and flaws. Expecting anything else is unrealistic. Bit-rot means that X isn't as well-suited to today's environment as we'd like, but I'm sure that some things in X that are regarded as mistakes now were trumpeted as great advancements when they were introduced. Similarly, Wayland will someday be in the same position. That doesn't mean that it's not a net-positive to develop and start using it, of course.
    - 10y ago

by nwah1 10y ago

bandrami 10y ago

Ah, the "throw away decades of bug fixes because This Time We'll Do It Right" temptation. I definitely get that sense from Wayland, which is a reason I'm leaving it alone for several years until it builds up the kind of fixes (a.k.a. "bloat" or "cruft") that make X11 Just Work for me. As far as the user permissions, fair enough, though I personally think hardware access should require root, for the most part.

cmurf 10y ago
You think average Joe User needs to be root or an admin capable of using sudo, to format a USB stick, or use a printer already connected to the computer? There is something that a locally logged in user is privileged to do without needing to be or become root. Apple and Microsoft have tossed out their window managers more than once also. X is older than anything they've had.
- bandrami 10y ago
  You think average Joe User needs to be root or an admin capable of using sudo, to format a USB stick, or use a printer already connected to the computer? I do, yes, which is why I avoid things like PAM and all the various FOO-kits (sadly Slackware has since succumbed to consolekit, which is why I've been moving to OpenBSD). I want to know that anything I do as my user without su or sudo or doas (depending) will not have an impact outside of my home directory. (Though to be clear, I think a display server could conceivably be justified for a dedicated non-root user -- fbterm seems like a good model here: getty hands over the VT to a user who has write access to the framebuffer.)
DonHopkins 10y ago
You see, that's the thing: X11 has been stuck in this Groundhog day of people proposing to fix it by making X12, or if they're really ambitious, Y. And it always will be that day. It's never going away.
majewsky 10y ago
> I personally think hardware access should require root, for the most part. Well, writing into the home directory requires hardware access, too. Where do you draw the line? In the similar way that the kernel's VFS provides authorized access to storage hardware, the *kits (or nowadays systemd-logind) provide authorized access to video/audio hardware.
- bandrami 10y ago
  > writing into the home directory requires hardware access, too. It requires access to a filesystem, which may or may not translate to writing to a physical disk, depending on the setup.

zeveb 10y ago

This is classic second-system thinking. 'This time we'll do everything right! This time we'll write it without any bugs!' Yeah, there's a lot to dislike about how X works. It's old, and it shows. But it has had man-centuries of work to get it where it is now; a de novo solution will necessarily need similar levels of work to get to a similar point. What could radically improve a next-generation X replacement would be to use a higher-level language than C, which would remove entire categories of errors as possibilities. I'm thinking either OCaml or Common Lisp could potentially be excellent choices, for very different reasons. But replacing one large, old, battle-tested C project with a large, new, untested C project isn't going to usher in a happy world of simplicity and security.

sqeaky 10y ago
> a de novo solution will necessarily need similar levels of work to get to a similar point That work does not need to be directly in the second system. If the hard lessoned were learned in X by making mistakes much effort can be prevented by not making those mistakes and use something closer to the finished design of the first system... which is exactly what Wayland is.
Frondo 10y ago
Of course Wayland will have bugs. What it won't have (hopefully) is the same design decisions and flaws that X made, because people have learned from X in the intervening decades since its inception.
- khedoros 10y ago
  It'll just have different design decisions and flaws. Expecting anything else is unrealistic. Bit-rot means that X isn't as well-suited to today's environment as we'd like, but I'm sure that some things in X that are regarded as mistakes now were trumpeted as great advancements when they were introduced. Similarly, Wayland will someday be in the same position. That doesn't mean that it's not a net-positive to develop and start using it, of course.
  - 10y ago