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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 leavin

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.

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.