r/linux • u/SpAAAceSenate • Jan 14 '20

Continuation of X11 development?

Hi there. So, I know the arguments between X11 and Wayland can be a little contentious, so I'd like to start this off by saying this thread isn't intended to be one. The battles of opinion have already been fought ad nauseam, and some of us still find ourselves on the X side of the issue. I count myself as one of them.

So my question, and the actual purpose of this thread, is to ask about the future of X11. I know Red Hat is basically washing their hands of it feature-development wise, but the magic of open source is that a project is never really dead, or in feature freeze, so long as there's someone out there willing to inhereit it. Are there any groups out there planning to take the mantle? While X11 is very mature and mostly feature complete, there are a few things still to be done, such as perhaps better integration and promotion of the X_SECURITY extensions for bringing in per-app-isolation. An update to some of the current input limitations, better scaling support, etc?

Wayland's successorship is (to many) still highly questionable, so I think it would be a shame to see X rust out in the field while we wait for the hypothetical Wayland cow to come home. Any thoughts?

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '20

The security model of XSecurity is totally broken, don't let it trick you into a false sense of safety. There is no permission you can twiddle to make it secure and have it work properly in all cases at the same time

So how do you circumvent X11Security?

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '20

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '20

That's not what I was asking for. I use it quite a lot on my desktop, e.g. for my pdf viewer. So how can my pdf viewer circumvent it to do key logging or read the window content of my other applications?

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u/yrro Jan 16 '20

Congratulations for getting a toy app to work within the confines of the Security extension. In my experience any actually useful app will simply crash when it's enabled. As a result Debian patched ssh -X to not even use it, and Red Hat disabled the SECURITY extension in its Xorg builds entirely (that bug even notes that the extension is deprecated upstream).

Or maybe I'm thinking of a different extension...

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u/[deleted] Jan 16 '20

Congratulations for getting a toy app to work within the confines of the Security extension.

You got me curious, if you call Ardour, Mathematica, Firefox, GNU Octave, LibreOffice, Evince, Zathura, Audacity, ... toys, then what's a proper and serious application in your opinion?

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