4 ms·

> And yet, empirically, jank is far more common on Wayland than X11 It depends on the type of jank you're talking about. It's wholly disingenuous to characteri

> And yet, empirically, jank is far more common on Wayland than X11 It depends on the type of jank you're talking about. It's wholly disingenuous to characterize Wayland as janky but x11 as not - the jank inherent to x11 is what made the original Xorg developers start making Wayland in the first place. Empirically, if x11 was perfectly fine there would be no motivation to design a successor. x11 gets the first-mover advantage of a lot of implementations and a straightforward design goal, but that's about it. It's not secure enough to recommend as a serious alternative to Mac and Windows users, and it's too slow and unopinionated to present a friendly face to new users. Features like 1:1 trackpad gestures, genuine HDR pipelines and a locked compositor framerate are all getting to the point that regular consumers expect them as default. If you want to keep using x11, it's unlikely someone is going to take it away from you. But it's on track for depreciation and hasn't been actively developed in years. Recommending it as a panacea to new users is a bad idea.

FeepingCreature 2y ago
> x11 gets the first-mover advantage of a lot of implementations and a straightforward design goal, but that's about it. It's not secure enough to recommend as a serious alternative to Mac and Windows users, and it's too slow and unopinionated to present a friendly face to new users. I've been recommending it as a serious alternative for years, and it's always presented a friendly face. > Features like 1:1 trackpad gestures, genuine HDR pipelines and a locked compositor framerate are all getting to the point that regular consumers expect them as default. I have never heard anyone not already a Linux user comment on even one of those as a problem.
- Arainach 2y ago
  >I have never heard anyone not already a Linux user comment on even one of those as a problem ....because Windows and Mac users have not had these problems since 2006?
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    That's not what he said.
- orangeboats 2y ago
  >I have never heard anyone not already a Linux user comment on even one of those as a problem. Those specific words are uttered by Linux users, true. However, Linux beginners _do_ notice some X11 issues, it's just that very frequently they only know "something" is off but not why they feel so. From anecdotal experience, touchpad gestures are actually something my friend complained so YMMV. We ended up making a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ to configure the synaptics driver. Another experience had to do with screen tearing, I helped them fix it by installing a compositor.
  - FeepingCreature 2y ago
    To be fair, my anecdotal coworker evidence with Wayland has been "the Webex client doesn't work" with the ten-second remedy of showing them how to set their default desktop back to X11.
    - orangeboats 2y ago
      That only tells us X11 has a first-mover advantage. Wayland supports screencasting too.
lupusreal 2y ago
> It's not secure enough to recommend as a serious alternative to Mac and Windows users The security risk of X11 is theoretical, not practical. Yes, X11 programs can maliciously keylog each other, but this just isn't a thing that actually happens. And even if you do start installing random malware from the internet like a classic windows user, Wayland isn't going to prevent you from screwing yourself anyway. To actually be safe while installing and running malicious applications you need extensive sandboxing. Wayland can be one part of that sandboxing but is useless without the rest (to prevent the malware from stealing user files including credentials, using LD_PRELOAD hacks or similar to keylog other applications anyway, etc), and no distro suitable for recommending to Windows/MacOS newbs has the rest of the requisite sandboxing. The sandboxing touted by Wayland advocates is very esoteric and without all that sandboxing, a newb using Wayland has to exercise just as much caution when downloading software as if he were using X11.
- orangeboats 2y ago
  > Yes, X11 programs can maliciously keylog each other, but this just isn't a thing that actually happens. A simple search leads me to this: https://github.com/anko/xkbcat https://github.com/anko/xkbcat There isn't a real attack using it yet, only because attacking Desktop Linux is a really unprofitable endeavor (considering the marketshare, the ROI must be very low). > To actually be safe while installing and running malicious applications you need extensive sandboxing FWIW, X11 is unsandboxable unless you run a second X server on top of your current server [0]. Which is fine, but you need to consider that most, if not all sandboxing solutions on Linux that "newbs" use, like Flatpak, do not employ such technique when running sandboxed X11 applications. The "security by default" behavior of Wayland limits the possible attack surface a lot, without requiring the end user to understand all the nitty details involved. [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap#Sandboxing_X11 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap#Sandboxing_X11
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    You're not telling me anything I don't already know and haven't already explained. X11 keyloggers are trivial, and virtually never seen in the wild. X11 makes sandboxing impossible, but that doesn't matter because I'm not going to waste my time on something like Qubes anyway, and newbs from Windows aren't being directed to setups like that either. They're all installing Mint or Ubuntu where the security of Wayland is nullified by the absense of sandboxing.

FeepingCreature 2y ago

> x11 gets the first-mover advantage of a lot of implementations and a straightforward design goal, but that's about it. It's not secure enough to recommend as a serious alternative to Mac and Windows users, and it's too slow and unopinionated to present a friendly face to new users. I've been recommending it as a serious alternative for years, and it's always presented a friendly face. > Features like 1:1 trackpad gestures, genuine HDR pipelines and a locked compositor framerate are all getting to the point that regular consumers expect them as default. I have never heard anyone not already a Linux user comment on even one of those as a problem.

Arainach 2y ago
>I have never heard anyone not already a Linux user comment on even one of those as a problem ....because Windows and Mac users have not had these problems since 2006?
- lupusreal 2y ago
  That's not what he said.
orangeboats 2y ago
>I have never heard anyone not already a Linux user comment on even one of those as a problem. Those specific words are uttered by Linux users, true. However, Linux beginners _do_ notice some X11 issues, it's just that very frequently they only know "something" is off but not why they feel so. From anecdotal experience, touchpad gestures are actually something my friend complained so YMMV. We ended up making a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ to configure the synaptics driver. Another experience had to do with screen tearing, I helped them fix it by installing a compositor.
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
  To be fair, my anecdotal coworker evidence with Wayland has been "the Webex client doesn't work" with the ten-second remedy of showing them how to set their default desktop back to X11.
  - orangeboats 2y ago
    That only tells us X11 has a first-mover advantage. Wayland supports screencasting too.

lupusreal 2y ago

> It's not secure enough to recommend as a serious alternative to Mac and Windows users The security risk of X11 is theoretical, not practical. Yes, X11 programs can maliciously keylog each other, but this just isn't a thing that actually happens. And even if you do start installing random malware from the internet like a classic windows user, Wayland isn't going to prevent you from screwing yourself anyway. To actually be safe while installing and running malicious applications you need extensive sandboxing. Wayland can be one part of that sandboxing but is useless without the rest (to prevent the malware from stealing user files including credentials, using LD_PRELOAD hacks or similar to keylog other applications anyway, etc), and no distro suitable for recommending to Windows/MacOS newbs has the rest of the requisite sandboxing. The sandboxing touted by Wayland advocates is very esoteric and without all that sandboxing, a newb using Wayland has to exercise just as much caution when downloading software as if he were using X11.

orangeboats 2y ago
> Yes, X11 programs can maliciously keylog each other, but this just isn't a thing that actually happens. A simple search leads me to this: https://github.com/anko/xkbcat https://github.com/anko/xkbcat There isn't a real attack using it yet, only because attacking Desktop Linux is a really unprofitable endeavor (considering the marketshare, the ROI must be very low). > To actually be safe while installing and running malicious applications you need extensive sandboxing FWIW, X11 is unsandboxable unless you run a second X server on top of your current server [0]. Which is fine, but you need to consider that most, if not all sandboxing solutions on Linux that "newbs" use, like Flatpak, do not employ such technique when running sandboxed X11 applications. The "security by default" behavior of Wayland limits the possible attack surface a lot, without requiring the end user to understand all the nitty details involved. [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap#Sandboxing_X11 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap#Sandboxing_X11
- lupusreal 2y ago
  You're not telling me anything I don't already know and haven't already explained. X11 keyloggers are trivial, and virtually never seen in the wild. X11 makes sandboxing impossible, but that doesn't matter because I'm not going to waste my time on something like Qubes anyway, and newbs from Windows aren't being directed to setups like that either. They're all installing Mint or Ubuntu where the security of Wayland is nullified by the absense of sandboxing.