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I never understood the rationale for Wayland's "security"... All the programs that I use (ls, rm, vim, ...) can "spy" to each other, and have unrestricted read
by enriquto 2y ago
I never understood the rationale for Wayland's "security"...
All the programs that I use (ls, rm, vim, ...) can "spy" to each other, and have unrestricted read/write access to all the bytes in my home directory. That's the whole point: I run these programs to control said bytes. What's so special about the pixels of my screen that the programs that manipulate them need to be protected from each other? If anything, the pixels in my screen seem less critical to security that the bytes in my disk. But Wayland insists in making that difficult, for incomprehensible reasons. Those are my pixels and I want to do what I decide, not what Wayland lets me to. I control my programs, not the other way round. If I decide that this program reads one pixel on my whole screen, or the global mouse position, or whatever, I see no point in forbidding me to do it.
Of course, if I want to run some rogue program whose author I don't trust, I will do so inside a limited container. But this has nothing to do with graphical applications. I wouldn't like the rogue program to read my homedir either.
- ok123456 2y agoThe rationale is that you can have a GUI in one of those limited containers and not spy on all your other windows.
- enriquto 2y agoYou already can with X11, for example running your rogue graphical program inside a graphical virtual machine. The vm gui will filter-out the events that happen outside the window and the rogue program will think it's running alone. It's nice that wayland makes such containerization much lighter, at least concerning the GUI (you still need to hide your filesystem, network, etc if you want to run rogue programs under wayland). But I don't see the point in enforcing it for each and every one of your programs. It's extremely unergonomic.
- rnhmjoj 2y agoI think the general direction where Wayland, Flatpak and other similar sandbox frameworks are going is that of users running proprietary, untrusted and more or less user-hostile apps on the desktop, just like on tables and smartphones.