alt Hacker NewsHow many keybings do you have and how often do you try new window managers? Compromising the security of the whole system just to save you a few `sed`s when writing some config files seems like a bad trade off.
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> Compromising the security of the whole system just to save you a few `sed`s when writing some config files seems like a bad trade off.
Those aren't the only two options. There's no need to compromise the entire system for everybody if the Wayland devs would agree to configuration that controls these things.
Then those of us who need stuff to work rgardless of WM would get stuff to work and the rest of the Wayland users can simply go with a WM that suits them.
Imagine you wrote an application that supports global, unfocused keybinds (OBS is one popular example).
Instead of implementing it one way that works forever with any WM/DE (X11), now you must rely on each individual wayland compositor to implement one or more optional extensions correctly, and constantly deal with bug reports of people that are using unsupported or broken compositors.
There's no need to compromise the security of the whole system. A trivially safe option would have been to restrict the ability to acquire global keybindings to specific clients, and require the user to confirm either once or every time (or any other policy you'd prefer). An X server could do that without breaking anything.
This issue is typical of the thinking that went into Wayland: No consideration was made when Wayland was announced of the fact that there were far simpler ways of achieving the same level of security.