It's Time To Admit It: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware

[karolherbst]

It is network aware, so this is complex. However simply removing the network aware capability is not an improvement. It is a mitigation that can only be useful for gamers and consumers.

I am also not convinced that all the individual Wayland compositors do not have a high number of vulnerabilities. Unfortunately even after all these years Wayland is too young and too niche for people to have really tested it. At this point Xenocara with privilege separation is likely more secure than most Wayland compositors. In fact the only Wayland compositors I would trust is Gnome's attempt and Sway. Compare this to the thousands of X11 Window Managers that all receive the same (generally reasonable) security from Xorg.

That's completely besides the point. In X11 you don't need vulnerabilities to extract users data. It's just part of X11. You can't prevent keyloggers or applications from recording your screen as this is not a security vulnerability, but a feature of X11.

At least with wayland compositors it would be and a high motivation to fix those issues.

[bearoso]

I still use X over Wayland. Why?

Is there a Wayland version of Chromium or Firefox that actually works? Nope. Chromium doesn't exist and Firefox is glitchy and officially pre-alpha quality.
Is Xwayland usable for those? Nope. Xwayland has a timer granularity of 1ms. So instead of 60fps, both run at 58.8fps and stutter excessively.
So there's no acceptable web browser.

What about multimedia applications? Well, few games use Wayland, so we're back to Xwayland. That 58.8fps thing rears its ugly head again. Wine doesn't work well with Wayland , either.

This is before looking at the poor condition of available compositors. Gnome, the popular one, has the infamous "display output and the entire shell run on one thread" problem that causes so much stutter. KDE Wayland is still officially pre-alpha again. Sway might be OK technically, but I need a stacking window manager.

Now, a lot of this is Xwayland's fault. This transitional layer has never been good enough for people to switch their desktop environment over, so nobody tries to port their applications over. Get Xwayland to run programs at 99% the integrity they do on X11 and people can start using a Wayland desktop. Then they can look into Wayland's cool new features and start porting applications to use them.

[Darxus]

You will soon realize that Wayland will be a passing fad with Gnome 3 and will disappear as an alternative like Mir. No-one that seriously has any sway in this industry will be able to deprecate it. The world won't function.

The entire point of wayland has always been that X is a gross mess that nobody wants to maintain. All improvements to X have required circumventing its own basic function. While needing to maintain lots of stuff nobody uses anymore. So all the X maintainers took all the good new stuff from X, added a little more code to stitch it all together, and called it wayland. And that's what they work on now instead of X. So... I don't see how that's going to be a passing fad, when X is the one that hasn't had a release in two years.

And wayland has a compatibility layer so that everything that works with X also works with wayland.

There are modifications being made to X. There is just nobody who cares about it enough to put a release together. You know what it would take to change that? You stepping up to do the release. But the problem is you don't care that much either. And the people who do care enough would rather work on wayland.

[bearoso]

That's completely besides the point. In X11 you don't need vulnerabilities to extract users data. It's just part of X11. You can't prevent keyloggers or applications from recording your screen as this is not a security vulnerability, but a feature of X11.

At least with wayland compositors it would be and a high motivation to fix those issues.

That's an good insight.

BeOS and Haiku run programs with full privilege. Windows XP and earlier did the same. Those operating systems were intended for single users. X11 is rarely used or allowed as a multi-user server anymore, so security would only protect users from themselves. That's what's stupid about Wayland. Wayland runs as a client application, but it tries to prevent stuff like keyboard grabbing, mouse warping, or giving any client program control of anything, even though everything is sandboxed to the user. That, too, only protects users from themselves. How about we treat people as competent and allow them to control their own hardware?

[dragon321]

I still use X over Wayland. Why?

Is there a Wayland version of Chromium or Firefox that actually works? Nope. Chromium doesn't exist and Firefox is glitchy and officially pre-alpha quality.
Is Xwayland usable for those? Nope. Xwayland has a timer granularity of 1ms. So instead of 60fps, both run at 58.8fps and stutter excessively.
So there's no acceptable web browser.

I'm using Firefox on Wayland every day since version 77 or 78 and I just wanted to ask: What are you talking about? It's stable and reliable for me and features like GPU acceleration or hardware video decode works without any noticeable problems. I think I would notice "pre-alpha quality". When did you try Firefox on Wayland last time?

[White Wolf]

As a 5700XT user Fedora Gnome wayland sucks. There are some issues atm and it works so slow with stutters for me so unless it will be fixed then no way I'm going for wayland.

[Mel Spektor]

Just tried wayland on KDE it surely looks much more usable than a couple of months ago still copying from gtk2 apps into konsole is borked you have to copy it twice (bug already reported) xclip works but it doesn't do middle click (I think)... Steam picks up the wrong keyboard layout (bug already reported also probably a steam bug). Also what about keycodes beyond 255? wasn't wayland the solution to that nasty bug? I can't map my multimedia keys that are beyond 255.

[klapaucius]

I'm using Firefox on Wayland every day since version 77 or 78 and I just wanted to ask: What are you talking about? It's stable and reliable for me and features like GPU acceleration or hardware video decode works without any noticeable problems. I think I would notice "pre-alpha quality". When did you try Firefox on Wayland last time?

Same here. Works perfectly with Intel Haswell GPU on Fedora and on AMD integrated gpu and with Ubuntu 20.10 on Wayland (enabled with MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1).

[kpedersen]

So all the X maintainers took all the good new stuff from X, added a little more code to stitch it all together, and called it wayland.

Not entirely. They are very different things. Wayland is a vague protocol with far fewer reatures (network aware is a critical one). The real work has been done by the compositor developers. So Weston only. And then you have unofficial implementations that most people use Gnome 3, Sway, etc. These are likely full of bugs that will expose themselves if Wayland ever became popular.

You know what it would take to change that? You stepping up to do the release. But the problem is you don't care that much either. And the people who do care enough would rather work on wayland.

If Xorg ever broke, I actually would stand up to the plate and fix it. Especially since there is no viable alternative. However, it isn't broken and doesn't need additional bloat just for the sake of it.

As for security, if you prevent remote sessions (which Wayland doesn't officially support anyway), then Xorg is likely to be just as secure. Unless you run spyware perhaps? But then it is pretty much game over for you anyway because you are using XWayland for 99% of things anyway.

How about we treat people as competent and allow them to control their own hardware?

I agree entirely. I care more about being able to achieve my tasks using a flexible workstation compared to what happens to some non-technical user who downloaded some spyware from the internet due to their incompetence. Unfortunately with the slow downfall of Microsoft, Linux is collecting these "less practical" users and does have to start pandering to them I suppose.

By non-technical users, I don't mean anyone on these forums. Think your average grandma. Linux GUI is governed by these guys

[Zan Lynx]

As a 5700XT user Fedora Gnome wayland sucks. There are some issues atm and it works so slow with stutters for me so unless it will be fixed then no way I'm going for wayland.

It works perfectly here on a Vega 56. Are you sure you're even running the amdgpu driver? Some 5700XT users installed back when the driver didn't understand the card and they got stuck with "nomodeset" on the kernel command line (look at /proc/cmdline) and they've been using LLVMpipe without realizing it, since it's actually pretty fast on a multicore CPU with AVX.