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> how should it be done by the application? It shouldn't be done by the application. It's the window manager's job to manage windows. As a user, I absolutely

> how should it be done by the application? It shouldn't be done by the application. It's the window manager's job to manage windows. As a user, I absolutely do not want applications to be able to put themselves wherever _they_ want. The windows go where _I_ want, and the window manager gives me a single place where I can manage all that.

quotemstr 6y ago
More specifically, I want to give some applications the ability to place windows where they want, warp the mouse, grab certain keys globally, snoop input, and so on. And I want to give other applications a small sandbox where they can't steal focus or hurt anything. X11 could have been evolved in this direction by sandboxing applications within little mini-universes within the existing protocol. Windows solved this problem without breaking compatibility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Interface_Privilege_Isolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Interface_Privilege_Isola... I have a fundamental philosophical disagreement with the Wayland and GNOME camp. They believe that they can enumerate all interesting use cases and that each app should fit in one of their pre-defined boxes. I'm old school and believe in making systems that provide mechanism, not policy, and that give applications the ability to do unanticipated things.
- c487bd62 6y ago
  Why don't you propose a protocol to solve the issues you have? If it solves a problem other users have it would get adopted I'm sure (except maybe GNOME). I'm not a Wayland developer but it's what I observed in the issue tracker of my WM. A limitation is often overcome by a protocol and a basic implementation after. If you put the work in, the wlroots and KDE people are always very nice and will help you get started. https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/tree/master/stable https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/tree/ma... https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/tree/master/unstable https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/tree/ma... https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/tree/master/unstable https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/tree/master/unstable
  - hedora 6y ago
    They did propose a protocol: X11 plus sandboxing, modeled after the windows approach to sandboxing.
    - c487bd62 6y ago
      And they are free to continue adding features and maintaining their preferred software choices. Nobody else seems to want to do it. IIRC the X11 maintainers are the same people who started Wayland. > https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fedora-workstation-31/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fed... > Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is. But we were talking about Wayland here. You're free of course to fantasize about hypothetical scenarios or propose features to software nobody wants to maintain.
      - hedora 6y ago
        Yeah, the end game for this seems pretty horrible. Wayland (still) doesn’t work, and is user-hostile (at least for this user). The BSD’s and most applications I use seem to be sticking with x.org. Maybe this is the end of portable, open source video stacks.
      - ComputerGuru 6y ago
        One of the problems is that X is effectively being deprecated in favor of something that isn't X 2.0: it has different goals, different targets, different ideologies, and not to mention different architecture. Eg Wayland is unashamedly Linux-centric (mind you, definitely not the same as Linux exclusive), while X most definitely isn't. One was designed to allow for remote rendering, one wasn't. One integrates the window manager functionality and one doesn't. The list of course goes on.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  >I want to give some applications the ability to place windows where they want, warp the mouse, grab certain keys globally, snoop input, and so on. This is already how it works. The plan with GNOME and wayland is to put those in the xdg desktop portal so they can be subject to whatever security policy is appropriate. Really, nothing has changed here in regards to how much mechanism is provided or not. And FYI, X11 can already be sandboxed using those methods in combination with firejail: https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/x11-guide/ https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/x11-guide/

quotemstr 6y ago

More specifically, I want to give some applications the ability to place windows where they want, warp the mouse, grab certain keys globally, snoop input, and so on. And I want to give other applications a small sandbox where they can't steal focus or hurt anything. X11 could have been evolved in this direction by sandboxing applications within little mini-universes within the existing protocol. Windows solved this problem without breaking compatibility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Interface_Privilege_Isolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Interface_Privilege_Isola... I have a fundamental philosophical disagreement with the Wayland and GNOME camp. They believe that they can enumerate all interesting use cases and that each app should fit in one of their pre-defined boxes. I'm old school and believe in making systems that provide mechanism, not policy, and that give applications the ability to do unanticipated things.

c487bd62 6y ago
Why don't you propose a protocol to solve the issues you have? If it solves a problem other users have it would get adopted I'm sure (except maybe GNOME). I'm not a Wayland developer but it's what I observed in the issue tracker of my WM. A limitation is often overcome by a protocol and a basic implementation after. If you put the work in, the wlroots and KDE people are always very nice and will help you get started. https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/tree/master/stable https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/tree/ma... https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/tree/master/unstable https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/tree/ma... https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/tree/master/unstable https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/tree/master/unstable
- hedora 6y ago
  They did propose a protocol: X11 plus sandboxing, modeled after the windows approach to sandboxing.
  - c487bd62 6y ago
    And they are free to continue adding features and maintaining their preferred software choices. Nobody else seems to want to do it. IIRC the X11 maintainers are the same people who started Wayland. > https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fedora-workstation-31/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fed... > Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is. But we were talking about Wayland here. You're free of course to fantasize about hypothetical scenarios or propose features to software nobody wants to maintain.
    - hedora 6y ago
      Yeah, the end game for this seems pretty horrible. Wayland (still) doesn’t work, and is user-hostile (at least for this user). The BSD’s and most applications I use seem to be sticking with x.org. Maybe this is the end of portable, open source video stacks.
    - ComputerGuru 6y ago
      One of the problems is that X is effectively being deprecated in favor of something that isn't X 2.0: it has different goals, different targets, different ideologies, and not to mention different architecture. Eg Wayland is unashamedly Linux-centric (mind you, definitely not the same as Linux exclusive), while X most definitely isn't. One was designed to allow for remote rendering, one wasn't. One integrates the window manager functionality and one doesn't. The list of course goes on.
cycloptic 6y ago
>I want to give some applications the ability to place windows where they want, warp the mouse, grab certain keys globally, snoop input, and so on. This is already how it works. The plan with GNOME and wayland is to put those in the xdg desktop portal so they can be subject to whatever security policy is appropriate. Really, nothing has changed here in regards to how much mechanism is provided or not. And FYI, X11 can already be sandboxed using those methods in combination with firejail: https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/x11-guide/ https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/x11-guide/