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I'm really tired of this Wayland horseshit. If there was an actual reason for users to use it, fine, but instead it breaks forwarding and vnc and xclip, and for

I'm really tired of this Wayland horseshit. If there was an actual reason for users to use it, fine, but instead it breaks forwarding and vnc and xclip, and for what exactly? Why should I upgrade?

kuschku 6y ago
Wayland improves: - Multi-Monitor support (especially with multiple different resolutions) - HiDPI support (even if some of your programs haven’t been updated for that yet) Now why does wayland break xclip and vnc? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless. Under X11, basically every application you run can trivially escalate itself to root. As even your Zoom client can just listen to your key events when you unlock your screen or use sudo in your terminal, save your password, and tada it can elevate itself. Under X11, there is no security whatsoever, and no separation of privileges.
- superkuh 6y ago
  That's because PCs aren't phones and the software run on PCs does not attack the user. This is different from phones where the user is the product to be sold and almost all software is antagonistic but it doesn't apply to the linux desktop, yet. edit: I completely agree about "electron applications". Those are not native applications on linux, those are badly made backdoors using browser runtimes. I do not run them and I strongly recommend to my family, friends, and peers not to run them.
  - kuschku 6y ago
    > but it doesn't apply to the linux desktop, yet. Microsoft has VSCode, Skype and Teams on linux, Zoom has a native linux client. With modern electron apps, often even being able to be updated remotely, you have to start treating more and more software as hostile as well. That said, even if you’d only have trustful software, you should still sandbox it, as if there’d be an RCE in a chat client you wouldn’t want the attacker to be able to elevate itself to root.
    - Macha 6y ago
      If you don't trust VSCode, then don't use it. Or use vscodium. But if Microsoft wanted to be evil through VS Code, they could already do enough damage by just sending your projects to them, I would imagine.
      - hnaccount141 6y ago
        It's not a question of trust, vulnerabilities can happen to anyone. Even if the devs at Microsoft were perfect (they aren't), all it takes is an rce in one of the libraries vscode depends on. (Like Chromium, which has happened before [0]) [0] https://www.electronjs.org/blog/chromium-rce-vulnerability https://www.electronjs.org/blog/chromium-rce-vulnerability
- phone8675309 6y ago
  >Under X11, you are basically running every application with root, always. This is not even remotely true. You are able to snoop on events that use the X server - typically programs run as your user or programs that you have chosen to forward to your X server. You are correct that the X server gets all events from all clients and therefore can log keys.
  - kuschku 6y ago
    > This is not even remotely true. You are able to snoop on events that use the X server - typically programs run as your user or programs that you have chosen to forward to your X server. Such as your screen locker, your terminal with a sudo prompt in it, or your graphical Apt client?
    - craftinator 6y ago
      Well, using the typical argument promoting Wayland, just don't use screen locker, gui terminal, or gui apt, and you'll be fine! That being said, I've been using Wayland for 2 years, and it's mostly just worked, and worked better than Xorg for many things. Unfortunately I often have to switch back to X for specific applications, but luckily Ubuntu has made that fairly painless. There are pros and cons; the arguments for and against Wayland don't really add much to the conversation, which is sort of an odd state to be in.
    - folmar 6y ago
      > Such as your screen locker, [...] or your graphical Apt client? No, not if input is grabbed, sorry. > your terminal with a sudo prompt in it, Pinentry&co are mainstream for a number of years.
      - kuschku 6y ago
        That’s true, but doesn’t solve the underlying issue of X11 security. You can patch some individual holes, but you can’t fix X11 to actually be properly isolated and secure (especially as that’d make compositors and DEs impossible to use).
- freeone3000 6y ago
  So what's the remote login or rendering solution for Wayland? I don't really care about security or efficiency or whatever, I just want something that works.
  - tbr1 6y ago
    "Wayland forwarding": https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe VNC: https://github.com/any1/wayvnc https://github.com/any1/wayvnc
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  > Now why does wayland break xclip and vnc? Does it matter why? If I use VNC to do my work, it is absolutely impossible for me to switch to wayland, no matter how justified the reasons are.
  - kuschku 6y ago
    It does, because it explains why this change has to be done by VNC client/server devs, and can’t be done in the wayland protocol or compositor. If a new replacement would have the exact same set of supported use cases as the original, it wouldn’t be useful. The point of wayland is that it enables some new use cases, while restricting some older ones. Wayland is still powerful enough to implement VNC (weston supports RDP in both directions) or xclip (KDE’s klipper works just fine under wayland). It just requires effort from third parties.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    No, it doesn't. What matters is that xclip and vnc aren't broken on Wayland. I mean, xclip is, but it's called xclip for a reason. The use-case is not broken, and is fulfilled instead by a tool called wl-clipboard.
- anthk 6y ago
  >Now why does wayland break xclip and vnc? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless. XTerm has a secure mode, which even locks the keyboard.
- taneliv 6y ago
  I wish I had the problem of having multiple monitors connected to one computer or (any of) them having too high resolution wrt. physical size! That said, thanks for reminding that all processes listening (potentially) to all events on X11. Switched now to Ubuntu's flavor of Wayland, let's see how that goes. (Last time I tried Wayland, it was because an update changed the default to it, without me noticing. Something important to me was then broken, and I had to switch back to Xorg, manually. That left a bad taste in mouth.)
mrweasel 6y ago
If nothing else, because X.Org is effectively no longer maintained. Redhat announced in 2019 that they are basically the only ones who even try to do any maintenance and they do not expect there to be a 1.21 release. In fact no one seems to want to manage a 1.21 release. Wayland still have bugs, but as Drew DeVault writes: They are fixable and importantly there are people willing to work on Wayland. One of the more pressing issue currently is the Nvidia drivers, but that's not the fault of the Wayland developers. Users need to complain to Nvidia about that.

I'm really tired of this Wayland horseshit. If there was an actual reason for users to use it, fine, but instead it breaks forwarding and vnc and xclip, and for what exactly? Why should I upgrade?

kuschku 6y ago

Wayland improves: - Multi-Monitor support (especially with multiple different resolutions) - HiDPI support (even if some of your programs haven’t been updated for that yet) Now why does wayland break xclip and vnc? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless. Under X11, basically every application you run can trivially escalate itself to root. As even your Zoom client can just listen to your key events when you unlock your screen or use sudo in your terminal, save your password, and tada it can elevate itself. Under X11, there is no security whatsoever, and no separation of privileges.

superkuh 6y ago
That's because PCs aren't phones and the software run on PCs does not attack the user. This is different from phones where the user is the product to be sold and almost all software is antagonistic but it doesn't apply to the linux desktop, yet. edit: I completely agree about "electron applications". Those are not native applications on linux, those are badly made backdoors using browser runtimes. I do not run them and I strongly recommend to my family, friends, and peers not to run them.
- kuschku 6y ago
  > but it doesn't apply to the linux desktop, yet. Microsoft has VSCode, Skype and Teams on linux, Zoom has a native linux client. With modern electron apps, often even being able to be updated remotely, you have to start treating more and more software as hostile as well. That said, even if you’d only have trustful software, you should still sandbox it, as if there’d be an RCE in a chat client you wouldn’t want the attacker to be able to elevate itself to root.
  - Macha 6y ago
    If you don't trust VSCode, then don't use it. Or use vscodium. But if Microsoft wanted to be evil through VS Code, they could already do enough damage by just sending your projects to them, I would imagine.
    - hnaccount141 6y ago
      It's not a question of trust, vulnerabilities can happen to anyone. Even if the devs at Microsoft were perfect (they aren't), all it takes is an rce in one of the libraries vscode depends on. (Like Chromium, which has happened before [0]) [0] https://www.electronjs.org/blog/chromium-rce-vulnerability https://www.electronjs.org/blog/chromium-rce-vulnerability
phone8675309 6y ago
>Under X11, you are basically running every application with root, always. This is not even remotely true. You are able to snoop on events that use the X server - typically programs run as your user or programs that you have chosen to forward to your X server. You are correct that the X server gets all events from all clients and therefore can log keys.
- kuschku 6y ago
  > This is not even remotely true. You are able to snoop on events that use the X server - typically programs run as your user or programs that you have chosen to forward to your X server. Such as your screen locker, your terminal with a sudo prompt in it, or your graphical Apt client?
  - craftinator 6y ago
    Well, using the typical argument promoting Wayland, just don't use screen locker, gui terminal, or gui apt, and you'll be fine! That being said, I've been using Wayland for 2 years, and it's mostly just worked, and worked better than Xorg for many things. Unfortunately I often have to switch back to X for specific applications, but luckily Ubuntu has made that fairly painless. There are pros and cons; the arguments for and against Wayland don't really add much to the conversation, which is sort of an odd state to be in.
  - folmar 6y ago
    > Such as your screen locker, [...] or your graphical Apt client? No, not if input is grabbed, sorry. > your terminal with a sudo prompt in it, Pinentry&co are mainstream for a number of years.
    - kuschku 6y ago
      That’s true, but doesn’t solve the underlying issue of X11 security. You can patch some individual holes, but you can’t fix X11 to actually be properly isolated and secure (especially as that’d make compositors and DEs impossible to use).
freeone3000 6y ago
So what's the remote login or rendering solution for Wayland? I don't really care about security or efficiency or whatever, I just want something that works.
- tbr1 6y ago
  "Wayland forwarding": https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe VNC: https://github.com/any1/wayvnc https://github.com/any1/wayvnc
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
perryizgr8 6y ago
> Now why does wayland break xclip and vnc? Does it matter why? If I use VNC to do my work, it is absolutely impossible for me to switch to wayland, no matter how justified the reasons are.
- kuschku 6y ago
  It does, because it explains why this change has to be done by VNC client/server devs, and can’t be done in the wayland protocol or compositor. If a new replacement would have the exact same set of supported use cases as the original, it wouldn’t be useful. The point of wayland is that it enables some new use cases, while restricting some older ones. Wayland is still powerful enough to implement VNC (weston supports RDP in both directions) or xclip (KDE’s klipper works just fine under wayland). It just requires effort from third parties.
- ddevault 6y ago
  No, it doesn't. What matters is that xclip and vnc aren't broken on Wayland. I mean, xclip is, but it's called xclip for a reason. The use-case is not broken, and is fulfilled instead by a tool called wl-clipboard.
anthk 6y ago
>Now why does wayland break xclip and vnc? Because "every program is a keylogger by default and can see any event, look at the contents of any window" is a major security issue, especially as it means the entire security model of screen lockers or containerized applications is useless. XTerm has a secure mode, which even locks the keyboard.
taneliv 6y ago
I wish I had the problem of having multiple monitors connected to one computer or (any of) them having too high resolution wrt. physical size! That said, thanks for reminding that all processes listening (potentially) to all events on X11. Switched now to Ubuntu's flavor of Wayland, let's see how that goes. (Last time I tried Wayland, it was because an update changed the default to it, without me noticing. Something important to me was then broken, and I had to switch back to Xorg, manually. That left a bad taste in mouth.)

mrweasel 6y ago

If nothing else, because X.Org is effectively no longer maintained. Redhat announced in 2019 that they are basically the only ones who even try to do any maintenance and they do not expect there to be a 1.21 release. In fact no one seems to want to manage a 1.21 release. Wayland still have bugs, but as Drew DeVault writes: They are fixable and importantly there are people willing to work on Wayland. One of the more pressing issue currently is the Nvidia drivers, but that's not the fault of the Wayland developers. Users need to complain to Nvidia about that.