So this is my big issue with Wayland - nothing is a ”Wayland problem”. Everything lands on the compositors. Features that existed for the past few decades in X and are deeply integrated into the ecosystem were relegated to second class citizens or just ignored. (Can we share our screens with Zoom yet?)
I won’t argue that X is flawless or should live forever. X should die. However, X actually solved problems instead of just providing a bunch of (IMHO) half baked ”protocols” so that someone else can solve the problem. From the perspective of a user or application developer, that’s just hot potatoes being passed around. And there have been plenty of hot potatoes the past decade.
Thank you for reading my yearly Wayland rant. I’ll now disappear into my XMonad-fueled bliss, fully software rendered.
Everything lands on the compositors. Features that existed for the past few decades in X and are deeply integrated into the ecosystem were relegated to second class citizens or just ignored
There were ten years that the desktop environment people wasted, where all those interfaces could have been created but they only started in earnest once the x.org devs put their foot down and said “nope we’re serious x.org is unmaintainable we’re not doing this any more”.
And no, X didn’t solve any of those problems – what it did was provide completely unrestricted access to everything to anyone and it took multiple decades before different clients would stop fighting each other over control over the desktop. That clusterfuck was one of the things that x.org devs wanted to avoid, but they, not being DE devs, also didn’t know what DE people actually needed. So they asked. And, as said, didn’t get an answer.
I have no idea what real world threat model and threat actor the Wayland people are going for. A threat actor with code execution on a Linux desktop immediately has access to the filesystem and can do whatever anyway, in practice (see also: Steam deleting home directories). Privilege Escalation is a thing and namespaces in Linux are kinda meh. Run your untrusted code in an ephemeral VM.
My point is just that once you have a threat actor running code on your system, it’s game over regardless of whatever your desktop tries to do. (I’ll run with the Maginot Line comparison here, but Wayland is more like a locked door without walls.)
The security issues with X were the X-Forwarding-stuff being kinda bad, not the ”full access to everything”-stuff. I want my applications to access my things, otherwise I wouldn’t run the application.
If your threat model seriously needs sandboxing, you’ll wanna go the Qubes-route. Anyways, Arcan seems to have a more reasonable threat model than Wayland if you wanna go that route.
Thanks for reading my yearly mini rant on why Wayland’s security don’t matter and only gets in the way of the user and application developer.
So this is my big issue with Wayland - nothing is a ”Wayland problem”. Everything lands on the compositors. Features that existed for the past few decades in X and are deeply integrated into the ecosystem were relegated to second class citizens or just ignored. (Can we share our screens with Zoom yet?)
I won’t argue that X is flawless or should live forever. X should die. However, X actually solved problems instead of just providing a bunch of (IMHO) half baked ”protocols” so that someone else can solve the problem. From the perspective of a user or application developer, that’s just hot potatoes being passed around. And there have been plenty of hot potatoes the past decade.
Thank you for reading my yearly Wayland rant. I’ll now disappear into my XMonad-fueled bliss, fully software rendered.
There were ten years that the desktop environment people wasted, where all those interfaces could have been created but they only started in earnest once the x.org devs put their foot down and said “nope we’re serious x.org is unmaintainable we’re not doing this any more”.
And no, X didn’t solve any of those problems – what it did was provide completely unrestricted access to everything to anyone and it took multiple decades before different clients would stop fighting each other over control over the desktop. That clusterfuck was one of the things that x.org devs wanted to avoid, but they, not being DE devs, also didn’t know what DE people actually needed. So they asked. And, as said, didn’t get an answer.
Sure, I’ll do another mini-rant.
I have no idea what real world threat model and threat actor the Wayland people are going for. A threat actor with code execution on a Linux desktop immediately has access to the filesystem and can do whatever anyway, in practice (see also: Steam deleting home directories). Privilege Escalation is a thing and namespaces in Linux are kinda meh. Run your untrusted code in an ephemeral VM.
My point is just that once you have a threat actor running code on your system, it’s game over regardless of whatever your desktop tries to do. (I’ll run with the Maginot Line comparison here, but Wayland is more like a locked door without walls.)
The security issues with X were the X-Forwarding-stuff being kinda bad, not the ”full access to everything”-stuff. I want my applications to access my things, otherwise I wouldn’t run the application.
If your threat model seriously needs sandboxing, you’ll wanna go the Qubes-route. Anyways, Arcan seems to have a more reasonable threat model than Wayland if you wanna go that route.
Thanks for reading my yearly mini rant on why Wayland’s security don’t matter and only gets in the way of the user and application developer.
No.