Early KDE Plasma 6 Development State: "It's Still Rough, But It's Usable"

[oiaohm]

_________________ X11_____Wayland
Secure _________yes _____yes
My apps work _yes ______no
Stable _________yes _______no
Performance __same ____same
Design quality _bad _____worse

There are problems here.
Secure by what standard. By :"Common Criteria" standard X11 common form is less secure than Wayland or Windows or Mac OS or Android. or IoS.

X11 with xace that can get a decent level but you x11 applications if not designed to work in xace envornment will not work. Lot of issues with XWayland and X11 applications is that its closer to X11 with xace enabled than people particularly like. Remember Xwayland is more forgiving than X11 with xace enabled.

X11 is not one thing. X11 without xace is what most people are not use to and this is not secure. X11 with xace is secure but 90% of x11 applications attempting to run in X11 with xace enabled to government standard for secure systems will be instantly terminated.

Design quality what standard are you using. "Common Criteria" standard has means of calculating Design quality. Again X11 is worse than Wayland by the "Common Criteria" standard way of measuring this.

Remember "Common Criteria" is the common standard most governments around the world use to assess these things.

Stable is highly up to debate there are enough documented issues with X11 to question this.

Really on Secure and Design Quality what standard did you use to come up with that assessment. Or is this just personal option with no assessment criteria if so your results are totally screwed by personal bias..

Yes you know instantly that someone is getting this wrong when X11 only has a single row. X11 with xace and without xace are two different rows with very different outcomes.

[Quackdoc]

still having troubles getting gstreamer working via python on KDE. works on everything else, including cosmic. screen capture saves the first screen then nothing. unfortunately this is kinda a breaking issue for me. maybe 6 will fix it

[Barnacle]

Secure by what standard.

Secure by the standard of my computer is not getting pwnd. Not secure by the standard that a group of security engineers got together and certified that it met all of their chin-stroking hypothetical security scenarios with no regard for whether it is still usable after they finished with it.

[Barnacle]

everything works.

Amazing. You took the time to test literally everything so that you could make such a broad statement, and found that it all worked without flaw?

If something is not working for you, you can make it work, you will need to learn the Wayland way.

Oh, I got it, I'm doing it wrong if Wayland doesn't work. What is this "Wayland Way"? Does it involve simply not doing things that don't work?

[oiaohm]

Secure by the standard of my computer is not getting pwnd. Not secure by the standard that a group of security engineers got together and certified that it met all of their chin-stroking hypothetical security scenarios with no regard for whether it is still usable after they finished with it.

But you posted this on-line. So your workstation computer never need to use a screen locker....

https://bhush9.github.io/2015/11/17/screenlocker-in-wayland/

Do note this is 2015. By "Common Criteria" this screenlocker in wayland for kde still not a good screen locker that is just a passable one. One of the problems with the X11 screenlockers is they crash and they fail unlocked. So anyone needing a screenlocker that works something Wayland can be a good starting point.

Yes X11 screen locker failures have cause people to loss work because their house cat got on their keyboard when they had the system locked because it had unlocked by itself. So pwned is not your only threat from features not being built up to security standards.

What wrong with the KDE wayland screenlocker . It simple really why does the kwin compositor for applications remain connected to input and output while the locker is active that is counter to how screenlocker functions under modern-day Windows and Mac OS.

I like how you just attempt to write it off as hypothetical security scenarios. You lose points in a government security assessment by having a feature that does not function correctly than not having the feature at all. You are right security assessments don't care about usability as that not a metric they are measuring. X11 solutions so far behind everything else because it loses points after points for offering features over and over again that from security requirements don't function as they should.

Not having a screenlocker gains you 0 points. Having a screen locker like KDE Wayland/android gains you 1 point having a screen locker like Windows/Mac OS gains you 2 points having a screen locker solution as you have with X11 -2 points that using one countries scoring sheet you yes the X11 final number is massive negative for clear reasons.

We do need to be open how far behind in security is X11 solutions is compared to Windows, Mac OS, Android, IOS in security. features. Mostly its not because feature is completely missing its that under X11 it does not work correctly causing X11 solution to have very bad security ratings.

Problem with claiming X11 is secure when its only for your particular use case with your stack of usage restrictions is that someone might believe your statement who need a screenlocker or something else to work at least somewhat correctly that its never going to-do with a X11 solution.

Solution not being secure does not prevent people from using it just the people using it need to be aware its not secure in particular areas and use the software with usage restrictions to prevent the issues.

Barnacle; Wayland solutions you need to do less usage restrictions to get to the same level of security vs X11 solution. Of course not all Wayland solutions are created equal from a security assessment either.

Good part is security assessment done by standards give repeatable results.

[bug77]

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/a-libweston-based-compositor-for-automotive-grade-linux.html

There are some very heavily used compositors based on libweston. Agl compositor used in lots of cars big one. There is another for aircraft controls. Items needing high certification. wlroots has some issues in those areas the design of it code base makes it harder to validate to required standards. Please note areas where libweston based compositors are used the little bits of missing functionality don't matter but the means to audit the code base is absolutely critical.

Would it be fair to say that Wayland's reference implementation is solid enough to qualify for those instances where you have limited interactivity, refresh rates don't matter and you don't have multiple apps running at the same time?

[Vistaus]

They do that every week. Read https://pointieststick.com/

I know that. My post was sarcastic because he made it seem like there were going to be zero changes in KDE 6.

[oiaohm]

Would it be fair to say that Wayland's reference implementation is solid enough to qualify for those instances where you have limited interactivity, refresh rates don't matter and you don't have multiple apps running at the same time?

AGL Compositor use case in does in fact have multi applications running at the same time output on the same screen. Think telsa where you have 1 screen displaying stack of different details on a single screen. Reducing failure break the outputs up between many applications. So the application showing fuel/battery crashing alone so leaving speed and the other applications up and running.. For things like reversing cameras refresh rates can be very important to get certified.

AGL Compositors use case end user will mostly not be deciding the location of windows. This these cases don't have to deal with random applications.

[mrg666]

Amazing. You took the time to test literally everything so that you could make such a broad statement, and found that it all worked without flaw?



Oh, I got it, I'm doing it wrong if Wayland doesn't work. What is this "Wayland Way"? Does it involve simply not doing things that don't work?

Okay let's hear. What is not working?