I don't know if I totally agree - only because even in reference the FreeBSD manual now mentions use of Wayland https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ - and ironic also to compare macOS considering the BSD roots of macOS so.....

pan64 I get it that this (some forms of Xorg root access) is not your way but surely you realize you are trying to imagine security issues, first citing Stuxnet which required physical access, having zero to do with external access through root use of X or otherwise, and then fell back to potential risks. If Xorg used as root could even potentially be hacked as a result of root access, I see no reason with many experts trying to poke holes into Linux this wouldn't be documented at the very least as an important potential, but it is not. Just consider kernels are released almost daily recently and each gets thoroughly scrutinized despite most will reach EOL within a year. Xorg has been around for many decades. It stands to reason any software as ubiquitous and long in service as Xorg would be especially heavily scrutinized.

It's fine and valid that this is not your way and for Wayland to disallow any GUI access under any conditions is OK too IF the practice doesn't for whatever reason get adopted in Xorg. However that is already happening in what I see as "tilting at windmills" absent even a shred of evidence this is truly a security risk. Choice... isn't that what Linux is supposed to be about?

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Bug reports are required in such instances. Inevitably there will be problems with some legacy software, especially where there is no active developer support remaining.

However, the reality most ordinary desktop users are not significantly impacted, if at all. I've been using KDE Plasma in both Xorg and Wayland environments for a while now, and the latter now offers a better graphical experience for my relatively simple desktop expectations.

It's easy to complain, but the reality is in the open source world projects are developed as a "do-ocrity" - that is those who participate and contribute get to influence the development. That is the price of free software. Feedback and bug reports people!

I was surprised to learn some new things from the FAQ on the freedesktop site.
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

For one, that X.Org can run on TOP of Wayland to provide network functionality! Also that they provided a utility "waypipe" to run on top of Wayland to provide network functionality.

I am still falling back to X.Org for some things, but the more I find out the more I want to play with the new toys!

Have you investigated Hyprland (wlroots-based tiling compositor)?

I tried Hyprland from SBo. This is what happened
Can it be made to work, I'm not sure. As for the networking, that's one of the things that's supposed to work but in actual practice neither Xephyr or Xnest will allow the windows inside them to move properly when receiving a remote desktop. They work with Xorg.

Alien Bob has jsoncpp, and the rest of what you need can be built, even with current versions, for labwc with swaybg and waybar from Slackbuilds. I've been working on setting up a desktop with it for awhile.
As for the bug reports, I know many times the answer is going to be "we don't support Wayland". In which case we'll have to wait for someone to reinvent the wheel (like in the case of grim), as in my "tool box" statement.

I'm guessing for backwards compatibility, as you can also run xorg sessions within wayland and also you have xwayland - question is for how long ? When versions diverge and wayland is worked on and xorg completely abandoned it isn't if but when do things start breaking down?

Freedesktop team is not developing X.Org, but they are not abandoning it either. It is still being maintained, and some fixes have been added since project Wayland got going. I do not expect X.Org to go out of maintenance totally until it has been abandoned by the major distributions. That will be QUITE a long while yet.

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I just want to keep Fluxbox as my window manager...

Okay. Nothing stops you. I have fluxbox on X.Org as one of my startup options for when Plasma is just in the way and I do not expect that to stop working for decades.

Just in case this link got lost in the thread, Jeebizz posted this retrobytes long form x11 history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-N-fgKWYGU

If you add that to the Unix Haters early history, you start to get a more complete picture of the thing. I just wanted to make sure that did not get buried, because it popped up on my feed and I realized that was the retrobytes video that had been mentioned fairly early on in this thread.

Now, for bringing the thing up to the present, I just watched this from Brody Robertson overview of an early January 2024 discussion about adding in more advanced... icon handling into Wayland protocol:

The Wayland Protocol To End All Wayland Protocols
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65wz6a5Nrjs

I highly recommend suffering through Brody's blow by blow recap of the various discussion threads around this issue, not to form an opinion for or against wayland or x11, but to get a sense of how hellish the development process is in the present. I suspect most anyone who has ever been involved in projects, whether FOSS or work, will recognize far too many bits as Brody drills into the discussion and how it evolved.

I'm guessing that wayland project does not have a BDFL, that is, someone with good engineering skills who can make a decision and enforce it so things can move on. Adding in the lack of core wayland protocol debuggers, it's quite easy to see why it has taken so long to get to even this point.

In a sense, this little snapshot into the reality of wayland protocol development help correct any notion that 'they' exist in any real way, in that, "oh, they should do this or that". The annoying thing is, if you dig into all the disparate points, views, opinions, suggestions, it's quite likely that each has some merit, and the person is not wrong to be pushing it.


Both of these make a nice sandwich, as in, how we got here, and where we are today, in reality, roughly speaking.

I've found this X.org thread quite useful because my general default IRC type behavior re wayland is to rant, lol, but after reading up more, watching more, it's probably going to start shifting to uncomfortable resignation to the inevitable, coupled with a firm vow to be among the last to switch, unless xfce4's xfwm4 gets a version they like stable, then I will probably barely notice is my guess. Maybe 2 years from now? KDE might be there roughly now with kwin_wayland, and hyprland is looking somewhat interesting to me as maybe first to really try, I was going to do sway since then I could largely reuse my i3 configs, maybe I'll do one of each on a laptop.

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Well it is not so much the distros, even Red Hat while "abandoning" xorg, have so far only removed references - but I haven't seen the xorg packages removed yet - but I could be wrong, still thats just Red Hat and remeber Red Hat or more correctly Fedora - is a bleeding edge distro. Xorg itself imo won't be abandoned until all the DE's and WM's pull support, and then you see projects like XFCE Cinnamon, MATE follow suite, although wayland support in Cinnamon Mate and XFCE is very rudimentary or in planning (MATE). So yea expect maintanence/security patches to be made available for years to come.

It is worth reminding,in this context, that the Red Hat we knew no longer exists. In the place of Red Hat we now have IBM, and they are what they have always been. The IBM products related to Linux are RHEL, CentOS-Stream, and Fedora.

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IMO I don't see how that is relevant - I never used any RH product so suffice to say they probably would have still done the same thing if they weren't acquired by IBM.

One good thing about Xorg is that you can configure it manually with xorg.conf.
Wayland's supposed to do all that automagically which is great when it works, but as soon as something unpredictable happens you're left with no configuration option.
Then you get depend on wayland developers' good will instead of writing your workaround in configuration file, which is kind of a downside I guess.