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Fedora 25 To Run Wayland By Default Instead Of X.Org Server (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Fedora 25 will finally be the first release for this Linux distribution -- and the first tier-one desktop Linux OS at large -- that is going ahead and using Wayland by default. Wayland has been talked about for years as a replacement to the xorg-server and finally with the upcoming Fedora 25 release this is expected to become a reality. The X.Org Server will still be present on Fedora systems for those running into driver problems or other common issues.
Fedora's steering committee agreed to the change provided the release notes "are clear about how to switch back to X11 if needed." In addition, according to the Fedora Project's wiki, "The code will automatically fall back to Xorg in cases where Wayland is unavailable (like NVIDIA)."
Fedora's steering committee agreed to the change provided the release notes "are clear about how to switch back to X11 if needed." In addition, according to the Fedora Project's wiki, "The code will automatically fall back to Xorg in cases where Wayland is unavailable (like NVIDIA)."
I use the desktop for work, since April 2011 Linux desktops have promoted Eye Candy above Functionality. I am not just moaning about Fedora here, these are generalized complaints. Will I be able to switch instantly between windows/desktops ? probably not, there will be some lag due to the necessities of Eye Candy. Will I have a visual indicator of which documents I have open, nope, I will have to rely on subtle clues hidden at the edge of the monitor to hunt for them. Will I be able to quickly and easily navigate/tab down to some little used graphics program, nope I will to use a graphic menu clicking all over the place and making sense of the whole screen or even worse have to google for the name and type it in.
I've read the x.org codebase. Mostly to discover the grey areas in the protocol when I was working on a X/Window server running on ms-windows. The x.org code is not pretty but that is mostly due to being an old code base.
The X protocol has its problems and quirks too, particularly when dealing with long latency between server and client. It was designed when using high-level primitives (eg "draw line to (x,y) in color Z") made sense. When client just use such primitives the speed is impressive. But some 10 years ago clients started doing client rendering and just sending bitmaps to the display server. Mostly that meant higher bandwidth and fewer round-trips. Whether that is good or bad depends on the clients and the environment.
I have followed the progress of wayland a bit, and I have actually seen some of the presentations. It seems to me that wayland initially was infested by the type of developers that think that all they need is direct access to video memory, and for remote applications all you need is VNC-style full-desktop remote. Of course people who use remote X think that that is a myopic and arrogant view. It seems that wayland has gained some developers in the past few years who have more common sense and one of the new goals is to support remote X clients in a root-less fashion. When they have implemented that and also made sure that both clipboard and X-selection work then I'll give wayland a shot.
Nobody's enthusiastic about X. We're not not happy about a replacement that lacks the features of X that we loved and in many cases relied upon.
And no, I don't want to hear that only "1% of users use the XSERVER variable" or that the underlying implementation wasn't very good.
Hardly anyone uses GNU/Linux, but we'd never accept that as an argument for abolishing the operating system and requiring Windows.
As for the latter - it doesn't matter if it's not perfect, it works damn it. I can manage a remote instance of LibreOffice as an app integrated on my desktop. I do this.
We'll be happy with Wayland when it's as good as, or better than, X11. Not when the underlying code is temporarily easier to understand (you think it'll stay that way?), but when its feature complete, by our standards, not by the developers.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
My understanding of why X needs to go away is that it comes down to security. The xdg-app/flatpak story is completely useless if you can have perfect isolation except for the graphics stack. X makes it trivial for one application to grab the graphical content of another process, but you can't securely implement a screen lock.
This is all out of date.
Firstly, programs can only grab each other's windows if you give them permissions to. X has security mechanisms to prevent it if you wish to prevent such things. The easiest way is to do X over SSH, and disable trusted X11 forwarding. All that does is use XAuth to mark the client as untrusted, and you can do that without using ssh.
The breaking out of sandboxes article a while back by Matthew Garrett only worked because in Ubuntu's implementation it treated the sandboxed programs as trusted. That's Ubuntu's fault not X, and in fact running his test program as untrusted demonstrated the X security mechanisms work just fine.
The screen locker one is both overblown and wrong. It's true that if something else has a full grab then the screen locker can't supersede it. In that case, you can't start the locker and it;s usually incredibly obvious. If the screen locker succeeds, it is secure and you can't break out of it.
But now it's also simply wrong. If you run a compositor, that intercepts ALL input events even with grabs because it has to be able to map them to the correct coordinates. If your screen locker is part of the compositor, then it is completely secure. I believe that's in fact exactly the same mechanism that's idiomatic in Wayland.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
1. Saying "the new thing is good because the old one is still available as fallback" is not a compliment to the new thing.
2. x.org was a fork of XFree86, an implementation of the X protocol. Wayland is a new, less capable architecture.
3. You seem quite angry. Are you on the Wayland development team?