X.Org Could Use More Help Improving & Addressing Its Security

[Vistaus]

Xorg goes against Unix philosophy, Linux goes against Unix philosophy, GCC goes against Unix philosophy. Oh, don't even get me started on Emacs. Unix philosophy is entirely non-viable on a modern, internet-enabled computer, it was created in an era where 64kb RAM was considered a lot and the internet didn't even exist. "Unix philosophy" today means "a braindead script that doesn't work with any modern configuration or IPC infrastructure". I don't understand people who beat this dead horse, but if you really fetishize it that much, you're using the wrong operating system with the wrong software ecosystem. Maybe try FreeDOS?

Internet? You mean the World Wide Web? 'Cause the internet was invented in 1969. I'm not so keen on correcting such small things, but since you're already nitpicking…

[Vistaus]

Do we have a score card anywhere?

All fedora and Red Hat based distros default to Wayland. Ubuntu has started to default to Wayland since 21.04. I dont know about Debian, OpenSuse, Manjaro, Arch etc.

Arch? Did I miss something? 'Cause last time I checked, Arch didn't have any defaults. Same goes for a regular Debian install. OpenSUSE has Wayland by default, but only on their GNOME spin. In Manjaro you can enable Wayland easily, but it's not enabled by default. So not sure if those fully count.

Which means only Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu and a couple of smaller distros use Wayland by default. Sure, Fedora, Ubuntu and Red Hat are very well used and among the most important distros, but they are by no means “most distros”.

[mdedetrich]

Which means only Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu and a couple of smaller distros use Wayland by default. Sure, Fedora, Ubuntu and Red Hat are very well used and among the most important distros, but they are by no means “most distros”.

Ontop of this Redhat may be very well used, but no one really uses it as a desktop distro, its main use case is a distro for servers. Most Redhat people use Fedora for desktop

[birdie]

Well, it's supposed to be a reference for how a compositor is supposed to be implemented, not an end product. It should implement all the features from the core protocol (does it?), but not much more. As long as it can handle windows as expected, it's fulfilling its purpose.

The problem is JWM which contains at least three times fewer lines of code yet it provides more features than Weston.

I've been under the impression that modern OSes are about reusing code and compartmentalizing and Wayland developers surely don't care about that and insist every dog must reimplement a reference Wayland server. This is IMO pure insanity and I don't understand how people can actually be happy with the status quo. To put it bluntly it's sick.

[billyswong]

I wouldn't call that "perfect". Not saying it's bad either, but as most design choices it looks like a compromise. In this case, memory use could increase terribly, same as with GPU/CPU use if rendering twice. Of course, that's assuming they do proper use of this multiple buffering. But if they don't, we have the far from perfect current state.

Hmmm, you may be right. My design only works as a "best case" if everyone do their job right. It would be more energy efficient if what pass through from client programs to compositor is not mandated to be a dumb bitmap, but possible to be vector drawing instructions, then let the server side handle how to best draw those lines / text. Many old GUI systems also somehow did this, for example X11. But now we "can't" do that anymore, because "security".

p.s. Compositor was considered a resource hog too. Memory use increase terribly. Applications are wasting time drawing overlapped portions. Now, ghost image when dragging an unresponsive window no longer happen and misbehaving applications dragging down every other GUI programs is a thing of past.

[mppix]

Actually I know the difference and the point is that the design of Wayland created this differentiation when it didn't exist before. Wayland's design forces each DE to re-implement the same functionality themselves and that is a problem that Wayland introduced.

Which is fine, but then don't go claiming that Wayland is fine to use when evidently because of the way it is designed its only fine for a specific DE that happened to implement it (and also don't be surprised that Wayland is not the default for many Linux distro's for this same reason).
comprehend.

No. Wayland is a protocol like X11 and there are multiple implementations for both (for X11, there is Xorg, Xquartz, Wwayland, etc.)
Also, you can implement wayland using a library wlroots, so this is not that different than using Xorg; KWinFT is doing exactly this.
Also also, the transition to wayland is standardizing a lot of interfaces, e.g. schreencasting, across all distributions, where we had a random amount of hacks before.
Don't blame it on Wayland if your DE still crashes using it or does not have the resources to implement it in the first place.

In the end, sensible distros will only make Wayland a default if it actually works for the DE environments that this distro supports, not sure why this is hard for people to comprehend.

So to you Debian stable + testing, Ubuntu, Fedora, Redhat, Suse are not sensible?
They all use Wayland as default on their default DE.
I think we can safely turn it around: non-sensible folks are trying to insist on Xorg - with limited to no rationale

[sinepgib]

Wayland developers surely don't care about that and insist every dog must reimplement a reference Wayland server. This is IMO pure insanity and I don't understand how people can actually be happy with the status quo.

While this is exactly my concern with Wayland, Weston is still fulfilling its purpose. We may not agree with what the purpose should be, but given they insist on everyone rolling their own, it makes sense.

Hmmm, you may be right. My design only works as a "best case" if everyone do their job right. It would be more energy efficient if what pass through from client programs to compositor is not mandated to be a dumb bitmap, but possible to be vector drawing instructions, then let the server side handle how to best draw those lines / text. Many old GUI systems also somehow did this, for example X11. But now we "can't" do that anymore, because "security".

TBF that hasn't been the case for X11 for years now. Everyone just posts a pixmap and calls it a day. That's why SSH forwarding is no longer a reasonable solution anymore, because that was efficient when you used vector primitives.

[mppix]

Arch? Did I miss something? 'Cause last time I checked, Arch didn't have any defaults. Same goes for a regular Debian install. OpenSUSE has Wayland by default, but only on their GNOME spin. In Manjaro you can enable Wayland easily, but it's not enabled by default. So not sure if those fully count.

Debian has defaults. The default DE is Gnome and Gnome defaults to Wayland on both Debian oldstable/stable/testing and Suse.
You can safely say that a default installation of all major distros will default to Wayland.

[sinepgib]

No. Wayland is a protocol like X11 and there are multiple implementations for both (for X11, there is Xorg, Xquartz, Wwayland, etc.)

Yes, but in practice you're only expected to use X.org full time, while the others are there just for supporting non-native applications under the given system. Plus, Xwayland shares a lot of the core code with X.org AFAIK, so if that's the case only Xquartz is really independent and mainstream (there are some no-longer-maintream implementations too, but I wouldn't count them as interesting in any way and I think are no longer alive).

[mppix]

Yes, but in practice you're only expected to use X.org full time, while the others are there just for supporting non-native applications under the given system. Plus, Xwayland shares a lot of the core code with X.org AFAIK, so if that's the case only Xquartz is really independent and mainstream (there are some no-longer-maintream implementations too, but I wouldn't count them as interesting in any way and I think are no longer alive).

Agree, point is: wlroots can be used in a similar manner than Xorg and for both exist alternatives.