this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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But where it the long-term profit? Every time Wayland comes up in the last 15 or so years since it was first mentioned somewhere it is an endless list of comments about things that don't work and "will work soon" (TM). Meanwhile in all that time there hasn't been a single exploit for the security issues Wayland claims to fix. X11 has worked just fine for all this time.
I am not opposed to replacing things in general (e.g. I do like systemd and never want init scripts back) but Wayland just seems like a bad design with bad goals and bad implementations.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/XOrg-Vulnerabilities-Since-1988
That talks about typical implementation vulnerabilities. I am talking about the kind of vulnerabilities the Wayland design supposedly protects us from by design.
You do realize you're comparing wayland to a protocol that doesn't even make an attempt at stopping keylogging, screengrabbing, or really implements any form of security whatsoever, right? I could make a list but it'd be effort, you should really research this stuff before you spread FUD on accident.
I'm just going to point out that there's a reason EVERY SINGLE PERSON who worked on X11 has moved onto wayland. Imagine how hard of a sell it'd be for most people to move on from a project that has THIRTY YEARS of work, to redoing everything from scratch, how many people in any other situation would ALL choose rewriting from scratch.
They learned from their mistakes, and that's why they restarted from scratch.
I have to research more thoroughly what the promised advantages of Wayland are, but from what I've heard is that the capability system is much more secure and the architecture is more decentralized, not a single server which takes everything down with it when it breaks.
Anyways, Wayland has a LOT more growth behind it. X is in the process of being deprecated. So I'm pretty sure Wayland must be better in some general way, otherwise it couldn't have gotten this momentum.