alt Hacker NewsHaving some kind of access control list or other method of enforcing access rights for windows and clipboards is definitely a good thing.
However, such a thing could be relatively easily added to X11 without changing the X protocol, so this does not appear as a sufficient motivation for the existence of Wayland.
I have not tried Wayland yet, because I have never heard anyone describing an important enough advantage of Wayland, while it definitely has disadvantages, like not being network transparent, which is an X11 feature that I use.
Therefore, I do not know which is the truth, but from the complaints that I have heard the problem seems to be that in Wayland it is not simple to control the access rights to windows and clipboards.
Yes, access to those must be restricted, but it must be very easy for users to specify when to share windows with someone else or between their own applications. The complaints about Wayland indicate that this mechanism of how to allow sharing has not been thought well. It should have been something as easy as clicking a set of windows to specify something like the first being allowed to access the others, or like each of them being able to access all the others.
This should have been a major consideration when designing access control and it appears that a lot of such essential requirements have been overlooked when Wayland was designed and they had to be patched somehow later, which does not inspire confidence in the quality of the design.
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In the same sense windows are not network transparent when in fact RDP works perfectly, certainly much better that X11 over WAN.
Actually for wayland there is wprs for remote display of apps so here it goes the network transparency argument...
Having a medium understanding of graphics hardware and software stack, and being an everyday desktop Linux user recently, it's hard to square these kinds of complaints with the actual technical situation. Like, people say X11 is network transparent but that's not in practice true. People argue the same problems could be solved in X11, but in practice despite a decade + of complaining about Wayland nobody did the work make the improvements to X. Unlike say the systemd situation Wayland just seems like a better and necessary design?
At a higher level, I've never found someone who is deeply familiar with the Linux GUI software stack who also thinks Wayland is the wrong path, while subjectively as a user most or all of my Linux GUI machines are using Wayland and there's no noticeable difference.
From an app dev perspective, I have a small app I maintain that runs on Mac and Linux with GPU acceleration and at no point did I need to a make any choices related to Wayland vs X.
So, overall, the case that Wayland has some grave technical or strategic flaws just don't pass the smell test. Maybe I'm missing something?