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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • jw13@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.mlThoughts on this?
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    10 months ago

    It’s a valid concern IMO. Any application on X11 can install a key logger, record your screen, and influence other applications in a myriad of ways. With open source software from a trusted repository, this is not an issue, but an increasing number of people run random binary blobs from Steam, the Snap Store and Flathub. I am 100% certain that some less-conscientious publishers are already using X11 features to build ad profiles of their users; it’s a matter of time before the first ransomware will appear. The only sensible way to prevent this, is to confine applications to their own space.

    But ok, more security isn’t a bad thing. But why not make it an option, like SELinux for example? That way users can choose a degree on a scale between security and convenience that suits their use case and circumstances. Why make it all or nothing?

    Wayland simply doesn’t have protocols for most of this stuff. (Applications are supposed to use D-Bus and portals.) Developing new protocols that offer X11-like functionality is a large investment and will also need changes in the toolkits and apps to make it work.


  • jw13@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.mlThoughts on this?
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    10 months ago

    That is a serious problem, but advocating X11 will not solve anything. Wayland is being improved every day, while X.org is in deep maintenance mode.

    And let’s not pretend that X.org is perfect. Race conditions at least can be fixed, even if it takes a lot of time and effort. Worst case, someone will rewrite wlroots in Rust. But in X11 any application can kill other applications, install a key logger, pin itself to the foreground, etcetera. This is by design: it’s what makes window managers, xkill and xeyes work. It’s also a huge security flaw that can never be fixed.


  • jw13@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.mlThoughts on this?
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    10 months ago

    Most of the post is an “argument from authority”: Trust me, I have a PhD and maintain my own X server, and I assure you that Wayland is a pile of shit!

    OP claims that “actually nothing will actually run” because the stable Wayland protocols lack so much important functionality. In reality, many people use Wayland every day, and multiple large distributions use it as the default display server. This doesn’t inspire confidence in OP’s knowledge.

    Admittedly, the first bug they linked is a real issue and it should be fixed, but it’s not a Wayland design flaw. It’s an (arguably important) feature that hasn’t been implemented by all compositors yet. With the second bug OP laments that Wayland compositors are implemented in C, an unsafe language. This is true about X.org too, so I don’t really see the point. Arguably Wayland improves on X11 here, because someone could develop a new Wayland compositor in Rust, while in X11 this is a core part of the display server.




  • I think you’re judging a bit too harsh. Elementary has it’s faults, but it is (was) an interesting OS with a lot of unique ideas:

    • The UI was gorgeous for its time, and in my opinion, their theme still looks better today than Adwaita and Breeze. They were among the first to offer global settings for light/dark modes, accent colors, and night light. It’s very consistent between applications, with a lot of attention to detail. Like they even had a custom icon theme for LibreOffice, just so it would fit in. In short, Elementary is much more than a simple “MacOS copycat”. This took a LOT of effort and it shows.
    • The “pay what you want” appstore was a novel idea, and I am sad that it didn’t work out.
    • The developer experience was quite good. They have excellent documentation that’s very accessible for newcomers, and for a while there were a number of interesting 3rd-party applications developed specifically for Elementary OS.
    • They cooperated with competing and upstream projects, mostly through freedesktop.org, and heavily invested in Vala. They maintained the GNOME email app when upstream lost interest, and contributed to Gnome Web.
    • Their included applications were really not that bad, and offered some unique features. For example, the file manager is probably the only one on Linux with Miller columns. And the terminal app is smart about CTRL+C, copying text when you want to copy text, and terminating the running process when that’s what you intended. I’m not exactly sure how it decides this, but it works perfectly.

    They ran out of funding last year, and their lead developer left. I think that explains the drop in quality that you encountered. Elementary used to be a coherent and polished OS, in a time when most Linux distributions were still a bit messy. I was a happy user for quite a while. Sadly, many of their innovations turned out to be a dead end. Their appstore mostly contains toy apps that nobody wants to pay for, Vala has lost traction, their “Code” IDE lacks LSP integration, and GNOME or KDE apps look out of place, and it’s impossible to upgrade to new releases. I wouldn’t recommend it anymore, but I hope that they will find their way back up again.



  • jw13@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.mlWhat's your preferred DE?
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    1 year ago

    GNOME. I currently use it without any extensions, but sometimes use “Blur my shell” for the visual effect.

    GNOME “just works” and looks extremely polished and consistent. It gives the application the maximum amount of screen real estate. The keyboard shortcuts are great. It’s very power-user friendly IMO.