I do not understand Wayland
Wayland is apparently a thing supposed to replace X11. And to be completely honest, I don't exaxtly understand what it is set to achieve. Like I get it, there is probably some better performance and whatnot, but the cost is that a lot of shit is less or more simply broken. And as far as I understand, it all comes down to the threat model.
“Lack of” security in X11
From what I understand, one of the reasons for Wayland's existence is the percieved lack of security. What does that mean? I did a bit of googling and here is what I gathered:
- There is no clipboard isolation, allowing a malicious process to steal clipboard contents;
- Keyloggers and malicious screen capture are very much possible because windows can capture input unfocused.
Wayland sets out to fix these two things... but let's ask ourselves completely honestly, are these really issues? In my opinion, no, not really – you should be only running the software you trust, and if that trust is incomplete you need way stronger sandboxing up to a chroot jail or even a virtual machine. If you are worried about a keylogger or screencapper but not malware that would simply grab your ssh keys and auth token files for popular software (i. e. Discord), then I feel something is very much missing from your threat model.
Getting in the way of the user
Now, granted a bit of hardening there – even if extraneous – would be fine and even beneficial, if not for the fact that it gets in the way of the user. The clipboard isolation makes simple control+C control+V situations annoyingly arcane at times and the screen capture limitations make screensharing or using OBS to stream/record anything from very inconvenient to impossible.
And then there are bugs. Now, granted, I don't know which of these bugs are Wayland bugs, XWayland bugs or KDE's compositor bugs – and which ones of them are now fixed over the course of roughly half a year since I've tried to use Wayland, however they still tainted my experience enough for me to not want to touch Wayland until the next decade – and I am sure I am not the only one that was thrown away like this. In roughly a two week period I experienced my keyboard inputs working both in Discord and in Firefox at the same time, I have experienced being unable to do basic copypaste into Discord or Firefox, and I've experienced being completely unable to screenshare on Discord despite giving it the permission to hook up into other apps. And sure, you could blame the people responsible for making Linux releases of Discord and Firefox, but honestly? It is Wayland that is coming in and breaking shit, and the rationale for doing so is very much insufficient for me.
Whyland and Whatland?
Yes, this is a bit of a late complain post. But my goal here is to understand what the fuck is Wayland even meant to be – a tech that is seemingly touted to be a successor to X11 in the same vein as systemd is a successor to traditional init scripts (sorry systemd haters, service files are an improvement). I am 100% positive that I am missing some very crucial info about Wayland and that I don't have a full view of the situation – and I do hope that someone will show me why and what is Wayland. I will very much appreciate some educational responses to this post on fedi, (preferably also ping my mastodon acc – @makiki@tech.lgbt) that would enlighten me to why Wayland is the way it is and what is the end goal of the project – because, frankly, I am genuinely confused when it comes to it.