Might be a stupid question, but what's wrong with Xorg?

I know that it wasn't originally conceived to do what it does today, but I've never had any problem using it, and when I tried Wayland I didn't notice any difference whatsoever.

Is it just that it's a pain to write apps for it..?

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the_why_of_y 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The real story behind Wayland and X, Linux.conf.au 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ

https://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/lca2013-wayland-x11....

	▲	sprash 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		All the major arguments in that decades old talk are invalidated with the introduction of DRI3.
	▲	altern8 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Oh, nice--thank you!

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exceptione 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Good question.

It makes sand-boxing security impossible. The moment a process has access to the Xorg socket, it has access to everything. It is weird that this oftentimes misses from the discussion though.

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altern8 4 days ago | parent [-]

Can't this aspect be improved, vs. switching to something else?

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sprash 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It is already possible today. There are access control hooks provided via XACE. Nobody uses them because the attack scenario is basically non-existent. If you run untrusted malicious apps having full access to your home directory you have big problems anyways. Not giving them access to e.g. the screen coordinates of their windows won't help you much then.

	▲	redeeman 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		which is exactly why you often dont give your sandboxed applications full access to your home directory :)

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exceptione 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I fear it is an unsalvageable part of the Xorg design. The software is really old, including its assumptions about security. The original developers judged Xorg is really not saveable.

Any extra effort on X11 might help to buy more time, but will in the end be for nothing. And in this time of supply-chain attacks, vs-code plugins, npm packages, agents and what-not, X11 is just too dangerous.

	▲	antisol 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The original developers judged Xorg is really not saveable. No, the orignal developers judged that they couldn't be bothered saving it. This has no relationship with whether it can be saved. > Any extra effort on X11 might help to buy more time, but will in the end be for nothing. And in this time of supply-chain attacks, vs-code plugins, npm packages, agents and what-not, X11 is just too dangerous Wow, this is some impressive vague fearmongering. Please explain what npm packages, vs-code plugins, and "agents" have to do with X11 being "just too dangerous"? Here, I'll try one: "Even in 2026 the developer of the i3 window manager says wayland isn't ready for real use. Any effort poured into wayland might delay it's inevitable collapse but in these days of nodejs, rising authoritarianism, and climate change it's clear that it will never actually gain wide acceptance"

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ElectroBuffoon 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

QubesOS and Xpra+Firejail demostrate security can be improved including the X11 side. Solaris had Trusted Extensions. X11Libre has a proposal for using different magic cookies to isolate clients and give dummy data to the untrusted. Keith Packard also proposed something in 2018.

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yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Is it just that it's a pain to write apps for it..?

Other way around: Maintaining Xorg itself is awful.

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antisol 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are a bunch of legitimate issues with X.

For example there's tons of legacy cruft in there intended for working with hardware that hasn't been in use since circa 1992. Things like monochrome 3D displays with weird resolutions like 1200x240 and non-square pixels. Having that stuff in there makes supporting more modern hardware more difficult than it needs to be (and is also part of the reason behind why e.g eliminating tearing is very difficult), and it adds huge complexity to the codebase for no benefit on modern systems, which makes it much more difficult (but NOT impossible, as some love to claim) to maintain.

There's also the wayland fanboy's go-to criticism: there are also some security shortcomings in the protocol. You can find details on this shortcoming which I have never in 30 years seen exploited in the opening paragraphs of every pro-wayland article on the internet. (it is a legit shortcoming. There have been multiple suggestions on how to address it over the decades without starting over from scratch. xlibre is working on one of these)

But over the years I've slowly become more and more convinced that the biggest issue people have with X is that it's not shiny and new.

I'm expecting them to announce a rewrite in rust any day now ;)