4 ms·

> This is classic second-system thinking. 'This time we'll do everything right! This time we'll write it without any bugs!' This is exactly what I'm afraid of.

> This is classic second-system thinking. 'This time we'll do everything right! This time we'll write it without any bugs!' This is exactly what I'm afraid of. Don't get me wrong, I go outside for a smoke every morning when I find out I have to as much as look at X code that day (fortunately, it doesn't happen too often), but you know what, X11 works. It has, furthermore, worked reliably for many, many years, on more architectures than I can name, running more applications than anyone can remember, and has reliably solved problems that no one even conceived of thirty years ago when X11 was written. For something that "barely holds together", it works admirably well for the end user, and the nowadays-hated extensibility and policy-but-not-mechanism have allowed it to remain a very useful solution. Wayland, in contrast, is universally applauded, but largely runs Gnome and a bunch of infotainment systems for automotive applications. X11 has also not always been so reliable, and frankly, I doubt Wayland will take much less time to become reliable. It took about 10 years for X11 to stop being a pain in the ass. I'm looking forward to using Wayland every day. In 2025 or so. Also, at the risk of looking like someone who wears his tinfoil hat to bed, it's worth considering that the two major improvements are largely relevant only for multimedia-super-heavy stuff and staying relatively safe from a legal standpoint while running 3rd party, untrusted (cough usually closed source cough) applications on a system that you manufacture and sell (oh, and a lot of people who want to move every application in the browser, but that could be solved by just sandboxing the browser). Before jumping into the PR boat and proclaiming the end of The Dreadful X11 Insecurity, it may be worth following the money trail.

ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "Wayland, in contrast, is universally applauded, but largely runs Gnome and a bunch of infotainment systems for automotive applications." Wayland is still being rolled out, it hasn't even managed to be the default compositor on any major Linux distros yet (though I heard that Fedora may choose to default to Wayland for its next release). Furthermore, KDE devs are clearly working on Wayland support, so it's not limited to one DE. > "Also, at the risk of looking like someone who wears his tinfoil hat to bed, it's worth considering that the two major improvements are largely relevant only for multimedia-super-heavy stuff and staying relatively safe from a legal standpoint while running 3rd party, untrusted (cough usually closed source cough) applications on a system that you manufacture and sell" What are you talking about? There's no closed source bias with Wayland.
- notalaser 10y ago
  > Wayland is still being rolled out, it hasn't even managed to be the default compositor on any major Linux distros yet (though I heard that Fedora may choose to default to Wayland for its next release). This is true on desktop systems. It's already running fine and dandy on many embedded systems, and it has been for a fairly long time. I have at least four or five boards in my office that are running it, for production purposes, i.e. real-life devices. Certainly it's going to see more adoption, including by KDE. But at the moment, its support in the desktop world is pretty much limited to Gnome and, uh, that i3-like compositor, I forgot its name. > What are you talking about? There's no closed source bias with Wayland. With Wayland itself, no, certainly. But one of the things that intrigues me is that somehow people would have you think that the open source community -- historically, one of the most security-conscious -- has managed to turn a blind eye to this elephant in the room, a frickin' walking keylogger, throughout the troubled 1990s and 2000s. You think we just somehow missed this disaster waiting to happen, and it took us 20 years to come with a contingency plan? It is not the only factor, nor the dominating one, but one of the significant reasons why some companies like Wayland is that it saves them a lot of headaches, including (potential) legal ones involved in selling equipment that has to run third party/OEM/crapware programs. Users of these systems may, and often will, input sensible stuff on their devices. You don't want every company who publishes an application to the app store to be able to read everything. Truth is, this has simply not been a major concern so far. It is becoming. I don't mean to say it's a bad thing, and like I said in my previous post, I certainly can't wait for when X11 will become history, but I think we need to keep a close eye on what's happening. It's important to understand that a need for device, software and user data control is a major driving factor behind much of today's technology, and it's worth keeping an eye on.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    > "Certainly it's going to see more adoption, including by KDE. But at the moment, its support in the desktop world is pretty much limited to Gnome and, uh, that i3-like compositor, I forgot its name." I'm not sure which i3-like compositor has Wayland support, but I believe Enlightenment supports Wayland. > "But one of the things that intrigues me is that somehow people would have you think that the open source community -- historically, one of the most security-conscious -- has managed to turn a blind eye to this elephant in the room, a frickin' walking keylogger, throughout the troubled 1990s and 2000s. You think we just somehow missed this disaster waiting to happen, and it took us 20 years to come with a contingency plan?" A lot of Linux servers run without X installed, you don't need GUIs to administer a Linux server. Seeing as Linux first found major popularity as a server OS, the security risks of X weren't quite as major as they may seem. Also, whilst X has its issues, there were more fundamental issues that took precedence in the earlier years of Linux. I remember when I started playing with Linux in the early 2000s one of the main issues was drivers. If you've ever had the pleasure of trying to get Windows WiFi drivers working with ndiswrapper, you'll know what I mean. Lastly, it does appear that there were proposals to improve/replace X11 over the years, but proposals are easy. I'd say the growth of Wayland was a mix of the right people at the right time. We're still waiting on something similar to emerge for the audio stack (though I'm hoping the work to improve the VR experience will be the catalyst that helps to drive this forward).

ZenoArrow 10y ago

> "Wayland, in contrast, is universally applauded, but largely runs Gnome and a bunch of infotainment systems for automotive applications." Wayland is still being rolled out, it hasn't even managed to be the default compositor on any major Linux distros yet (though I heard that Fedora may choose to default to Wayland for its next release). Furthermore, KDE devs are clearly working on Wayland support, so it's not limited to one DE. > "Also, at the risk of looking like someone who wears his tinfoil hat to bed, it's worth considering that the two major improvements are largely relevant only for multimedia-super-heavy stuff and staying relatively safe from a legal standpoint while running 3rd party, untrusted (cough usually closed source cough) applications on a system that you manufacture and sell" What are you talking about? There's no closed source bias with Wayland.

notalaser 10y ago
> Wayland is still being rolled out, it hasn't even managed to be the default compositor on any major Linux distros yet (though I heard that Fedora may choose to default to Wayland for its next release). This is true on desktop systems. It's already running fine and dandy on many embedded systems, and it has been for a fairly long time. I have at least four or five boards in my office that are running it, for production purposes, i.e. real-life devices. Certainly it's going to see more adoption, including by KDE. But at the moment, its support in the desktop world is pretty much limited to Gnome and, uh, that i3-like compositor, I forgot its name. > What are you talking about? There's no closed source bias with Wayland. With Wayland itself, no, certainly. But one of the things that intrigues me is that somehow people would have you think that the open source community -- historically, one of the most security-conscious -- has managed to turn a blind eye to this elephant in the room, a frickin' walking keylogger, throughout the troubled 1990s and 2000s. You think we just somehow missed this disaster waiting to happen, and it took us 20 years to come with a contingency plan? It is not the only factor, nor the dominating one, but one of the significant reasons why some companies like Wayland is that it saves them a lot of headaches, including (potential) legal ones involved in selling equipment that has to run third party/OEM/crapware programs. Users of these systems may, and often will, input sensible stuff on their devices. You don't want every company who publishes an application to the app store to be able to read everything. Truth is, this has simply not been a major concern so far. It is becoming. I don't mean to say it's a bad thing, and like I said in my previous post, I certainly can't wait for when X11 will become history, but I think we need to keep a close eye on what's happening. It's important to understand that a need for device, software and user data control is a major driving factor behind much of today's technology, and it's worth keeping an eye on.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "Certainly it's going to see more adoption, including by KDE. But at the moment, its support in the desktop world is pretty much limited to Gnome and, uh, that i3-like compositor, I forgot its name." I'm not sure which i3-like compositor has Wayland support, but I believe Enlightenment supports Wayland. > "But one of the things that intrigues me is that somehow people would have you think that the open source community -- historically, one of the most security-conscious -- has managed to turn a blind eye to this elephant in the room, a frickin' walking keylogger, throughout the troubled 1990s and 2000s. You think we just somehow missed this disaster waiting to happen, and it took us 20 years to come with a contingency plan?" A lot of Linux servers run without X installed, you don't need GUIs to administer a Linux server. Seeing as Linux first found major popularity as a server OS, the security risks of X weren't quite as major as they may seem. Also, whilst X has its issues, there were more fundamental issues that took precedence in the earlier years of Linux. I remember when I started playing with Linux in the early 2000s one of the main issues was drivers. If you've ever had the pleasure of trying to get Windows WiFi drivers working with ndiswrapper, you'll know what I mean. Lastly, it does appear that there were proposals to improve/replace X11 over the years, but proposals are easy. I'd say the growth of Wayland was a mix of the right people at the right time. We're still waiting on something similar to emerge for the audio stack (though I'm hoping the work to improve the VR experience will be the catalyst that helps to drive this forward).