GNOME 3.34 Works Out Refined XWayland Support For X11 Apps Run Under Sudo

[Britoid]

GNOME is terrible on a tablet, it's just marginally better than every other DE and GTK has decent touch support.

The only thing tablet-y about GNOME is the app grid, but you don't use that 99% of the time when launching applications in GNOME anyway.

[Brisse]

GNOME on Wayland works well, but some basic things work poorly, such as copy & paste which doesn't work if you close the source application prior to pasting. 😢

I thought that was by design, for security reasons. Maybe I'm wrong.

[kpedersen]

Running any GUI application via sudo always made me feel uneasy. They use too many libraries; too many environmental variables; too much going on. Even back when Gnomes settings menus worked correctly; I preferred to run the command line equivalents.
Its similar on Windows; you know as soon as you launch a i.e regedit as Admin; it is creating lots of manky cruft in the administrator profile with regards to the ui system.

Offtopic rants about Gnome and Tablets...

I suppose you can class something like the old Thinkpad X61 tablet as running Gnome 3 on a tablet but lets be honest, Gnome 3 will never actually run on a modern (locked down) tablet or smart (locked down) phone and since they are all that exist; I suppose we will never know how well it functions. All I know is that it is pretty exhausting using it as a desktop.

The only reason why people say it might work on a tablet is because the menus have been replaced by that silly slow fullscreen grid launcher and the window manager has been crippled beyond all hope and really is only used to just launch all non-transient windows fullscreen these days.

Notice the word fullscreen? People think that fullscreen is what makes a tablet or phone UI work. Its not; efficient layout is what makes limited input devices like touch work and Gnome 3 doesn't actually have that; it just gives the illusion that it does. There are no scrollable lists for one in 99.9% of software available, the date / calendar will simply be too small on a real tablet; the shutdown requires "shift" to be held to change to suspend. It is just laughable. It has single handedly killed Linux on the desktop. And Wayland will kill Linux in the enterprise and datacentre.

I don't really care about Gnome existing; what is a shame is that it is absorbing a lot of talented developers where their skills would be better used elsewhere rather than fighting with... whatever Gnome is.

[Britoid]

I thought that was by design, for security reasons. Maybe I'm wrong.

I think it's fixed by https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...pboard-Manager

[Veerappan]

Does this XWayland sudo work mean that it will be possible to run the Synaptic package manager on Wayland?
I wish Synaptic was ported to Wayland, unfortunately it seems its pretty much only Michael Vogt who develops it, and that he is putting much time into it. 😢

I wish it was possible to run GNOME Wayland without XWayland and X.Org Server installed.

GNOME on Wayland works well, but some basic things work poorly, such as copy & paste which doesn't work if you close the source application prior to pasting. 😢

It may not be the best thing from the security standpoint, but I've been using the following script for a few years to run sudo apps in XWayland on gnome shell, including synaptic:

$ cat ~/bin/sugo
#!/bin/bash
echo '$@='$@

[ -n "$1" ] || exit 0
xhost si:localuser:root
sudo $@
xhost -si:localuser:root

Save that, make it executable, and you can then run

sugo synaptic

[cyclistefou]

They don't. I'm okay with this for backwards compatibility, but any application that wants to run natively under Wayland as root should instead use the proper mechanisms to execute things as root.

Man, nothing should run as root, actually. I love, really love Linux, but it is so sad that with so many mechanisms for security (e.g. AppArmor, SELinux, capabilities, namespaces to name a few, some of which complementary), people still have to run apps as root which means full control over the system.

Desktop Linux is the worst thing that could happen to computing security, at least in the default configuration of all Linux distributions that I know. Wayland has the potential to fix X11 security woes, and now what? People still want to execute programs as root.

Desperate.

[cyclistefou]

Not all of them do. The apps that open their UI as root (sudo) like Gparted don't work on Wayland without this. Well they do work, but you need to give it permission with the xhost command, as XWayland would reject connections to it from another user.
Apps that don't open their UI as sudo but do use sudo for privileges escalation when needed, like pacman, work normally.

EDIT: And IMHO, it's a bad thing some apps STILL open their UI as root.

Now some sense of reality. But still far from actual security because still granting root privileges to sub-processes.

[cyclistefou]

Man, nothing should run as root, actually. I love, really love Linux, but it is so sad that with so many mechanisms for security (e.g. AppArmor, SELinux, capabilities, namespaces to name a few, some of which complementary), people still have to run apps as root which means full control over the system.

Desktop Linux is the worst thing that could happen to computing security, at least in the default configuration of all Linux distributions that I know. Wayland has the potential to fix X11 security woes, and now what? People still want to execute programs as root.

Desperate.

Can't edit, sorry. Additional comment: please checkout QubesOS and SubgraphOS... going in the right direction.

[Vistaus]

Performance on my tablet under Wayland is great, better than the default Windows 10 installation that came with my tablet. But until they add a full keyboard mode (tab, escape, modifier and cursor keys) to the OSK, it's pretty much useless on a tablet.

That's what OnBoard is for.

[V1tol]

kpedersen welcome to 2019. 2-in-1s is a thing... GNOME really shines in tablet mode.

Until you have Atom-based tablet.