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> I will have to disagree. I like having options. Before Wayland having options meant that your app starting GUI and your file manager was different. If Wayland

> I will have to disagree. I like having options. Before Wayland having options meant that your app starting GUI and your file manager was different. If Wayland had meant there were now two options one deprecated and the other coming this wouldn't have really been a huge problem. I agree that the transition has been long and messy. But the Linux desktop experience has always been a fragmented mess of half-baked apps that quickly fall into disrepair. Wayland breaks a lot of stuff that has been in maintenance mode for a long time. That sucks, but it's not a good argument for sticking with X11. The situation with X11 had been unacceptable ever since the adoption of virtual memory and Wayland is the only real alternative. > It's a problem now because insisting on standardizing on so little means we now have fragmentation the likes of which we never had with X and will likely have for many years to come. I'm not going to criticize the boundaries of a standard that I haven't been deeply involved with. I understand their impulse to keep it minimal, as Wayland is something of a forever standard. But I am sympathetic to arguments that Wayland doesn't do enough. > Even more so because it isn't yet ready about 6 years after its fanboys started insisting it was and shitting on other options and dismissing actual problems as the mutterings of crackpots and luddites. If by "other options" you mean Mir, my memory is that the primary criticism of Mir's original architecture replicated Wayland in an incompatible way without any good reason for doing so. Eventually Mir was re-architected to layer it on top of Wayland and does provide more of the batteries you seem to want to have by default. If by "other options" you mean X11 ... only crackpots and luddites think applications should be able to spy on each other [0]. What other options were there? > What does "competitive" even mean in this context? * Not having every app double as a key-logger. * A working screen-locker. * Not tearing on window resize or scrolling while a video plays. * Multi-DPI monitors. * Non-blocking API calls. * etc [1]. I remember context menus being especially glitchy. > Linux has had a nicer GUI since 2003 and if you don't hop on the pointless change parade a fairly consistent one. I literally switched to linux for a better interface 19 years ago and its still better. Let me guess, you use some "minimalist" desktop environment? I'm not here to hate on people that don't need what most consider a modern user experience. If that's what you want, that's great! I was into lightweight desktop environments for a while and liked exploring that design space. But I'm also a usability engineer who remembers Linux back then: it was not competitive with OS X and it still isn't. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_wayland_situation https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_waylan...

michaelmrose 4y ago
================================================= * HALF BAKED ================================================= > But the Linux desktop experience has always been a fragmented mess of half-baked apps that quickly fall into disrepair. > Let me guess, you use some "minimalist" desktop environment? You mean the environments which aren't half backed and instead of falling into disrepair just sit there quietly working the same way so you can use your computer to do useful things? ================================================= * WAYLAND SECURITY ================================================= Millions of people have apparently solved the keep applications from secretly hacking you for man eons and decades of real time by not installing uncle bobs malware from www.notarealsite.com or responding to prompts to install software by fake support scam agents. This is admittedly inferior to better isolation but better isolation is quite hard and few people are actually tackling it in any meaningfully complete way. If I solely switched today from X to Wayland I wouldn't meaningfully improve my security because apps aren't strongly firewalled from one another and so many vectors exist its more like installing a screen door than a bank vault. Proposed improvements like flatpak actually greatly reduce security in practice by - Allowing users to be targeted by targeting already fixed vulnerabilities in flatpaks with outdated libraries - Making it MUCH easier to get random bobs software in front of the user - Trivializing the gap between compromised developer and user by shortening the gap between compromise and distribution from days->weeks to minutes->hours. All told security is on net a pretty pointless reason to switch to wayland at this point. See qubes, distro processes, FDE, user education about common scams for actual improvement in security. Lets be real you knew I didn't mean MIR. ================================================= * COMPETITIVE POINTS ================================================= - Tearing: I didn't have this problem in 2003 and I don't have it now. - Multi-DPI monitors: I am typing this on a machine with a 4K monitor flanked by 2 1080p monitors. I scale them down from a higher resolution. Apps think all 3 are the same DPI and its transparently scaled down so that UI elements are identically sized on all displays. Nothing is blurry. - Non-blocking API calls. I'm using an environment not writing one. None of your users on earth care. ================================================= * SECURING LOCKED COMPUTERS ================================================= On desktop machines screen locking provides by default similar levels of security as locking a bathroom door it protects against casual intrusion. You can keep someone from sitting down and looking at your email it cannot prevent an attacker with physical access to your computer from gaining access to your data. You could get greater security by blocking switching TTY and by blocking usb devices from being attached while the screen is locked for example with USBGuard regardless of choice of display server. https://usbguard.github.io/ https://usbguard.github.io/ For machines that are at risk of actual attack you would want to to rely on FDE and either full shutdown or locking critical data when user isn't in physical control of the device. None of this has much to do with choice of display servers and choosing Wayland by default doesn't appear to do much beyond what could be accomplished by blocking changing ttys. ================================================= * END LINKS ================================================= I'm not sure why you linked either TempleOS or a 9 year old write up on the design flaws of X. For what its worth its not only dated but bad as well. Just to pick on a particularly bad patch. >Wayland breaks everyone's desktop.” Also wrong. Once XWayland is finalized and merged we should have more-or-less perfect backwards compatibility because every X app just gets its own mini X-server to deal with. This was back in 2013 and the entire ecosystem has spent 9 years going through growing pains with applications going through a plethora of Wayland specific issues with entire categories of applications disappearing or requiring different implementations on different compositors years later. In 2013 this was basically the definition of over-promise under-deliver. It's aged like milk and it makes the authors analysis challenging to take seriously.

michaelmrose 4y ago

================================================= * HALF BAKED ================================================= > But the Linux desktop experience has always been a fragmented mess of half-baked apps that quickly fall into disrepair. > Let me guess, you use some "minimalist" desktop environment? You mean the environments which aren't half backed and instead of falling into disrepair just sit there quietly working the same way so you can use your computer to do useful things? ================================================= * WAYLAND SECURITY ================================================= Millions of people have apparently solved the keep applications from secretly hacking you for man eons and decades of real time by not installing uncle bobs malware from www.notarealsite.com or responding to prompts to install software by fake support scam agents. This is admittedly inferior to better isolation but better isolation is quite hard and few people are actually tackling it in any meaningfully complete way. If I solely switched today from X to Wayland I wouldn't meaningfully improve my security because apps aren't strongly firewalled from one another and so many vectors exist its more like installing a screen door than a bank vault. Proposed improvements like flatpak actually greatly reduce security in practice by - Allowing users to be targeted by targeting already fixed vulnerabilities in flatpaks with outdated libraries - Making it MUCH easier to get random bobs software in front of the user - Trivializing the gap between compromised developer and user by shortening the gap between compromise and distribution from days->weeks to minutes->hours. All told security is on net a pretty pointless reason to switch to wayland at this point. See qubes, distro processes, FDE, user education about common scams for actual improvement in security. Lets be real you knew I didn't mean MIR. ================================================= * COMPETITIVE POINTS ================================================= - Tearing: I didn't have this problem in 2003 and I don't have it now. - Multi-DPI monitors: I am typing this on a machine with a 4K monitor flanked by 2 1080p monitors. I scale them down from a higher resolution. Apps think all 3 are the same DPI and its transparently scaled down so that UI elements are identically sized on all displays. Nothing is blurry. - Non-blocking API calls. I'm using an environment not writing one. None of your users on earth care. ================================================= * SECURING LOCKED COMPUTERS ================================================= On desktop machines screen locking provides by default similar levels of security as locking a bathroom door it protects against casual intrusion. You can keep someone from sitting down and looking at your email it cannot prevent an attacker with physical access to your computer from gaining access to your data. You could get greater security by blocking switching TTY and by blocking usb devices from being attached while the screen is locked for example with USBGuard regardless of choice of display server. https://usbguard.github.io/ https://usbguard.github.io/ For machines that are at risk of actual attack you would want to to rely on FDE and either full shutdown or locking critical data when user isn't in physical control of the device. None of this has much to do with choice of display servers and choosing Wayland by default doesn't appear to do much beyond what could be accomplished by blocking changing ttys. ================================================= * END LINKS ================================================= I'm not sure why you linked either TempleOS or a 9 year old write up on the design flaws of X. For what its worth its not only dated but bad as well. Just to pick on a particularly bad patch. >Wayland breaks everyone's desktop.” Also wrong. Once XWayland is finalized and merged we should have more-or-less perfect backwards compatibility because every X app just gets its own mini X-server to deal with. This was back in 2013 and the entire ecosystem has spent 9 years going through growing pains with applications going through a plethora of Wayland specific issues with entire categories of applications disappearing or requiring different implementations on different compositors years later. In 2013 this was basically the definition of over-promise under-deliver. It's aged like milk and it makes the authors analysis challenging to take seriously.