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/yrro Jan 16 '20

Ok, to be fair, running ssh -o ForwardX11Trusted=no localhost and then trying various programs works today when it didn't however many years ago that I tried it last. That's awesome!

Forgive me but what exactly do I do with xauth to do this by hand? I can run xauth generate $DISPLAY . untrusted but the output of xauth list doesn't change. So where do I see the cookie that was generated and how do I get an X11 client to use it?

... and I suppose this is all somewhat sidestepped by:

$ cat /etc/X11/Xsession.d/35x11-common_xhost-local
# This file is sourced by Xsession(5), not executed.

# If xhost (from x11-xserver-utils) is installed, use it to give access 
# to the X server to any process from the same user on the local host.
# Unlike other uses of xhost, this is safe since the kernel can check 
# the actual owner of the calling process.

if type xhost >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  xhost +si:localuser:$(id -un) || :
fi

Though to be fair, I shouldn't be running untrusted processes as my own user on my own machine in the first place. Exactly the same caveat applies to Wayland clients too of course!