3 ms·

It’s the job of the display manager / compositor to handle screensavers.. yes any arbitrary app can’t become your screensaver welcome to the 21st century.

saurik 3y ago
Why is the 21st century all about software moving in the direction of becoming a monolithic brick with centralized bottlenecks on adding functionality?
alerighi 3y ago
To me Wayland has the problem that too much functionality is done inside it. Basically it does the function of the display manager (X), compositor and window manager. While the last two were usually done by the same component also under X (while not strictly required), having the display manager and the window manager as separate components makes sense. Also having the compositor as a separate application to be fair, since that way the compositor could crash but the window manager would continue to function (without compositing, but this is not a fondamental thing). The window manager can crash, but under X it can be restarted (or is restarted automatically). You don't loose all your windows and open applications. On Wayland this is not possible. In GNOME if you type F2 and r you restart the graphical session under X, useful if some extension created some trouble. Under Wayland no way, log out and log back in and loose all your work. Is this good 21st century design? To me, not. A program should handle a single task and should do it well. X did one thing, the window manager another, the compositor another, XScreensaver another, etc. If I want to substituite a component I could. Also X is a client/server program, Wayland is not. Why does it matter? Under X I can run applications on a remote server and they are rendered locally. I use it time to time, because it uses far less bandwidth than using (let's say) VNC, since the rendering happens locally and only X drawing commands are passed trough the SSH connection (instead of a video stream). Wayland decided that this is not needed. To me Wayland is not that good design. It's not reliable after nearly a decade of being "nearly done", while X still works and it's still solid as a rock. If only they spended some time to improve X instead of rewriting everything from scratch... whatever. And if we want to talk about performance... to me it seemed that 10 years ago Compiz under X with a crappy GPU was more reactive than the modern Wayland window managers. Finally... X did have the possibility to change DPI of the fonts in the ~/.Xresources file! Yes, natively. Thus a window manager that only used X primitives (such as i3) did work flawlessly on HiDPI screens from decades. They seems to be still figuring it out in GNOME under Wayland for fracional values...
- eklitzke 3y ago
  X11 is obviously insanely flexible, no one will argue that. It is also riddled with complexity, security problems, and performance problems. Programs like xlock are notorious for numerous security problems over the years, for precisely this reason. Yeah programs like xlock work now, but it took 20 years to get them to be not completely broken. If you think X11 is basically secure and just works, you're either delusional or brand new to Linux/Unix. Wayland is way simpler, has a more secure design, and handles modern GPUs much more efficiently. It's missing a lot of features X11 had, but the fact that you can use one program to run a screensaver, another program to lock the screen, and another program to do window management (oh, and also another program which is the actual X11 server) is something that 1% of users care about. The other 99% of users are OK with using Gnome or KDE or XFCE or whatever other desktop environment just does all this stuff. The client/server argument held weight 5 or 10 years ago, but waypipe exists now and works great (I would know, I use it regularly myself). Actually it works much better than X11 forwarding ever did thanks to the modern compression codecs it has built in. And the fact that the waypipe code is just a regular unprivileged application rather than something built into the compositor means that I don't need to worry about what security holes. Your comment just reads as a bunch of half thought out anecdotes (not all of which are factually accurate). There's a reason why basically EVERYONE who is actually knowledgeable about how X11 works decided that it was completely broken and welcomed Wayland when it came along.
  - koolala 3y ago
    To me, it doesn't seen like X11 or Wayland was designed for the future spatial displays of computers. Compositors in 10 years are complex three dimentional stenciling things. So ultimately its still unclear to me which will be more flexible in the long run.
- em-bee 3y ago
  To me Wayland has the problem that too much functionality is done inside it. Basically it does the function of the display manager (X), compositor and window manager. While the last two were usually done by the same component also under X (while not strictly required), having the display manager and the window manager as separate components makes sense. i thought it was the other way around. in X11 everything including display manager and compositor are part of X itself, only the window manager is a client, whereas wayland separates the protocol and the compositor and display manager. the latter includes the window manager because a window manager always had a privileged position, and that i think interfered with the security architecture. by not having the need to allow a privileged window manager, wayland apps are more secure against interference by other apps.
zajio1am 3y ago
That is false dilemma between 'only compositor can handle screensavers / global keybindings / screen grabs' and 'arbitrary app can grab screen / read all keystrokes'. It is easily conceivable to have a system, where regular applications cannot do these things, but privileged programs can do that (without being integrated into one big compositor).

saurik 3y ago

Why is the 21st century all about software moving in the direction of becoming a monolithic brick with centralized bottlenecks on adding functionality?

alerighi 3y ago

To me Wayland has the problem that too much functionality is done inside it. Basically it does the function of the display manager (X), compositor and window manager. While the last two were usually done by the same component also under X (while not strictly required), having the display manager and the window manager as separate components makes sense. Also having the compositor as a separate application to be fair, since that way the compositor could crash but the window manager would continue to function (without compositing, but this is not a fondamental thing). The window manager can crash, but under X it can be restarted (or is restarted automatically). You don't loose all your windows and open applications. On Wayland this is not possible. In GNOME if you type F2 and r you restart the graphical session under X, useful if some extension created some trouble. Under Wayland no way, log out and log back in and loose all your work. Is this good 21st century design? To me, not. A program should handle a single task and should do it well. X did one thing, the window manager another, the compositor another, XScreensaver another, etc. If I want to substituite a component I could. Also X is a client/server program, Wayland is not. Why does it matter? Under X I can run applications on a remote server and they are rendered locally. I use it time to time, because it uses far less bandwidth than using (let's say) VNC, since the rendering happens locally and only X drawing commands are passed trough the SSH connection (instead of a video stream). Wayland decided that this is not needed. To me Wayland is not that good design. It's not reliable after nearly a decade of being "nearly done", while X still works and it's still solid as a rock. If only they spended some time to improve X instead of rewriting everything from scratch... whatever. And if we want to talk about performance... to me it seemed that 10 years ago Compiz under X with a crappy GPU was more reactive than the modern Wayland window managers. Finally... X did have the possibility to change DPI of the fonts in the ~/.Xresources file! Yes, natively. Thus a window manager that only used X primitives (such as i3) did work flawlessly on HiDPI screens from decades. They seems to be still figuring it out in GNOME under Wayland for fracional values...

eklitzke 3y ago
X11 is obviously insanely flexible, no one will argue that. It is also riddled with complexity, security problems, and performance problems. Programs like xlock are notorious for numerous security problems over the years, for precisely this reason. Yeah programs like xlock work now, but it took 20 years to get them to be not completely broken. If you think X11 is basically secure and just works, you're either delusional or brand new to Linux/Unix. Wayland is way simpler, has a more secure design, and handles modern GPUs much more efficiently. It's missing a lot of features X11 had, but the fact that you can use one program to run a screensaver, another program to lock the screen, and another program to do window management (oh, and also another program which is the actual X11 server) is something that 1% of users care about. The other 99% of users are OK with using Gnome or KDE or XFCE or whatever other desktop environment just does all this stuff. The client/server argument held weight 5 or 10 years ago, but waypipe exists now and works great (I would know, I use it regularly myself). Actually it works much better than X11 forwarding ever did thanks to the modern compression codecs it has built in. And the fact that the waypipe code is just a regular unprivileged application rather than something built into the compositor means that I don't need to worry about what security holes. Your comment just reads as a bunch of half thought out anecdotes (not all of which are factually accurate). There's a reason why basically EVERYONE who is actually knowledgeable about how X11 works decided that it was completely broken and welcomed Wayland when it came along.
- koolala 3y ago
  To me, it doesn't seen like X11 or Wayland was designed for the future spatial displays of computers. Compositors in 10 years are complex three dimentional stenciling things. So ultimately its still unclear to me which will be more flexible in the long run.
em-bee 3y ago
To me Wayland has the problem that too much functionality is done inside it. Basically it does the function of the display manager (X), compositor and window manager. While the last two were usually done by the same component also under X (while not strictly required), having the display manager and the window manager as separate components makes sense. i thought it was the other way around. in X11 everything including display manager and compositor are part of X itself, only the window manager is a client, whereas wayland separates the protocol and the compositor and display manager. the latter includes the window manager because a window manager always had a privileged position, and that i think interfered with the security architecture. by not having the need to allow a privileged window manager, wayland apps are more secure against interference by other apps.

zajio1am 3y ago

That is false dilemma between 'only compositor can handle screensavers / global keybindings / screen grabs' and 'arbitrary app can grab screen / read all keystrokes'. It is easily conceivable to have a system, where regular applications cannot do these things, but privileged programs can do that (without being integrated into one big compositor).