alt Hacker NewsAs a user, I like wayland. X11 was a security disaster. Wayland is much better about tearing.
What scares me though are all the responsibilities passed to compositors, because what ends up happening is that each compositor may reimplement what should be common functionality in annoying ways. This is especially true for input things, like key remapping. This ultimately fragments linux desktop experiences even harder than it was before.
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Win32 has managed to do this without any API change, all the existing APIs work. The same approach would've worked for X11.
What it does is simple - all the functions that deal with windows/handles or events simply do not work on ones that you don't have access to, for example, the EnumWindows function allows you to wall through the tree of windows simply do not see the ones the process has no access to. SetWindowsHookEx which allows you to intercept and modify messages meant for other windows simply doesnt fire for messages you're not supposed to access.
Granted, outside of UWP apps, the application of security is rather lax (this is for legacy purposes, the security's there, just not enforced), but for apps running as admin, or UWP apps, the sandboxing is rather solid.
IMHO the security advantage of Wayland is mostly a myth and probably the same is true regarding tearing. The later is probably more an issue with respect to drivers and defaults.
> X11 was a security disaster.
This only matters if you compare properly sandboxed apps, otherwise an app that runs with your uid can still do harm and practically indirectly completely compromise the system..
Are most flatpaks _properly_ sandboxed? Of course not.
Huh. The "security" preventing me from doing things I want to do is a major reason I dislike Wayland :/. (e.g. automation & scripting / input events, clipboard, ...)
It also has noticeable mouse lag for me, I really hope this isn't due to avoiding tearing.