KDE Plasma 5.11 Rolls Into Beta With New System Settings, Better Wayland Support

[Awesomeness]

There is nothing in the announce itself about Wayland being ready for prime time or not.

“Plasma's Wayland support has been long in the making, and while it isn't fully there as a replacement for X11, more and more users enjoy Wayland on a daily basis.”

Reading is hard, I know…

[ssokolow]

I know KDE is not spying on me, but I'm afraid other programs might. Especially the closed source ones.
I just want a privacy / security control panel where I can disable programs access to webcam and mike like Android and Windows 10 has.
Too bad no desktop environment takes privacy seriously.

It's more about the architecture of the system as a whole. If you've been around long enough, you might remember what a struggle it was to get some applications to not bypass the mixer and claim the audio output exclusively.

The kind of control you want requires that every application be automatically run in some kind of sandbox, even if that sandbox defaults to "allow all".

The problem is that the sandbox itself can result in bugs. For example, I want to write a game launcher with a bunch of "fix common mistakes" features, like using a union/overlay filesystem to ensure that attempts by games to write to their install folders (some do) get redirected to a folder where I can make backups without having to back up all the bits I can just re-download from GOG or Humble or wherever... it turns out that just using OverlayFS (the one built into the Linux kernel) on whatever kernel I was running for *buntu 14.04 causes some games to claim that some resource files are missing.

Because of that, they're not willing to rush on this issue.

[Danny3]

KDE does not spy on you. Implementing privacy settings would be useless for two reasons:
- AFAIK neither USB nor PCI(e) devices can be restricted to certain applications, you can just disable them for the whole system. Therefore such settings would not be a barrier for malicious applications, just "recommendations" for nice applications on how to please the user.
- Widespread multi-platform applications from big companies like Chrome/Chromium or Steam would never respect some non-standard practices of one or two desktop environments with a share of 0-3% of the applications' user base (non-standard in respect to dominant operating systems, of course...).

I know KDE is not spying on me, but I'm afraid other programs might. Especially the closed source ones.
I just want a privacy / security control panel where I can disable programs access to webcam and mike like Android and Windows 10 has.
Too bad no desktop environment takes privacy seriously.

[TheBlackCat]

Same reason X11 has properties like WM_CLASS and WM_WINDOW_ROLE... to give the compositor reliable primary keys for indexing into its store of persisted window geometries and/or matchable identifiers for its set of custom window-positioning rules.

After all, if a multi-window application wants to persist those windows, it's not really reliable to use window titles.

Wayland has properties like that too.

[Ansla]

And what makes you think they can't be used in Wayland as well? At least WM_CLASS deffinately is: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/comm.../msg00939.html

[ssokolow]

Why would a compositor need a protocol to do something? Protocols are required when applications need to tell the compositor to do something. But that's not the case here, the compositor knows each window's position so it can save it / restore it if the user desires that.

Same reason X11 has properties like WM_CLASS and WM_WINDOW_ROLE... to give the compositor reliable primary keys for indexing into its store of persisted window geometries and/or matchable identifiers for its set of custom window-positioning rules.

After all, if a multi-window application wants to persist those windows, it's not really reliable to use window titles.

[Ansla]

Why would a compositor need a protocol to do something? Protocols are required when applications need to tell the compositor to do something. But that's not the case here, the compositor knows each window's position so it can save it / restore it if the user desires that.

[unixfan2001]

You don't need a protocol, that is something entirely up to the compositor. Again, if the compositor doesn't do that, it is completely and totally the compositor's fault.

The whole point of Wayland is to use protocols over hard implementations. So yes, you do need protocols.
Anything else just leads to more fragmentation.

[TheBlackCat]

Of course it's up to the compositor but there is no standard protocol for remembering initial window placement.

You don't need a protocol, that is something entirely up to the compositor. Again, if the compositor doesn't do that, it is completely and totally the compositor's fault.

[uid313]

That's not a GNOME issue, that's a conscious Wayland design choice.

Well I hope they fix it somehow.
Because it is very annoying that applications don't open where I last closed them the last time.
It makes the user experience unpredictable and doesn't cater to the preferences of the user.

I run Ubuntu aardvark daily, which use Wayland but I still use X.Org because it works better.