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> if there’s any way to crash xscreensaver, that is a potential security issue...
This has happened before: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354
This appears to be an attempt at trolling or bait (“Drew Default”) but I’ll bite.
> Wayland ostensibly supports several dozen extensions, but only the GNOME-blessed extensions can be reasonably expected to work.
Instead of actual protocol extensions it seems like the author is talking about desktop tools. “only the GNOME-blessed extensions can be reasonably expected to work” oh GNOME and nowhere else, because GNOME has a “loose relationship” with standards. Meanwhile the rest of the ecosystem is unifying behind wlroots, which coincidentally I have made a small list of tools for that cover most needs: https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots
> I can assure you that it’s a nightmare. Creating a new compositor would be a hellish experience. Ask any distribution packager who works with Wayland to share their horror stories — they have many.
Distribution packagers try to make compositors? Maybe they should take a look at wlroots.
> Even on the supported platforms it comes with a substantial burden on build requirements, calling for 10× to 100× or more RAM, CPU time, and power usage.
Obviously not. Some sessions on GPU acceleration being available nowadays, but that’s not a new development. The GNOME Wayland session has been demonstrated to be faster than the X session (many years ago on a Raspberry Pi).
> Novel hardware which addresses issues like microcode and open hardware, like POWER9 and RISC-V, are also suffering under Wayland’s mainstream-or-bust regime.
Why? What does “mainstream-or-bust”? Probably not the protocol maintainers’ tendency to compromise on things to make Wayland not appealing to average users (ha).
> Anyone left behind is forced to use the legacy Xorg codebase you’ve abandoned, which is much worse for their security than the hypothetical bugs you’re trying to save them from.
Xorg, by design and historical growth, is insecure. That said security fixes will of course continue to be shipped (I don’t say this with any internal knowledge of Xorg maintainable, only trust in the FOSS ecosystem). Of course, the user base is still huge.
> Rewriting your code in Wayland is always going to introduce new bugs, including security bugs, that wouldn’t be there if you just maintained the Xorg code. Maybe there are undiscovered bugs lurking in your Xorg codebase, but as your codebase ages under continuous maintenance, that number will only shrink.
Xorg is insecure. Not because of bugs, but because of features people rely on.
> Those of us who work with such systems, we feel like the Wayland community has put its thumbs into its collective ears, sung “la la la” to our problems, and proceeded to stomp all over the software ecosystem like a toddler playing “Godzilla” with their Lego, all the while yelling at us old fogies for being old and fogey.
I agree. I consider ”Out of scope” to be the unofficial Wayland motto.
The summary at the end is a beautiful soup of contradictions.
> Slow down the protocol
It’s already fairly slow.
> write a specification
That’s what a protocol is, isn’t it?
> focus on improving your protocol extensions
By that do you mean adding more? I thought the protocol was developing too quickly?
> support more Xorg programs
The charitable interpretation is that it means “support more Xorg use cases”, which is completely valid. The way it’s said would also allow for the interpretation that the author hasn’t understood what Wayland is and wants X APIs added.
> work on performance, stability, and accessibility
The protocol allows for very high performance. If individual compositors are inefficient, please talk to their maintainers. This isn’t an issue with Wayland in general. Same deal with stability. The compositor I use (wayfire) is super stable. Unfortunately I can’t comment much on accessibility other than that I know that Linux has historically been pretty bad in this area.
> Invest more in third-party implementations like wlroots.
With it defining the third compositor type besides KDE and GNOME I think wlroots is seeing an healthy amount of investment. What’s going too slowly for my taste is the standardization and adoption of wlroots protocols by other compositors (will GNOME ever care about what other people are doing? Will they stay incompatible forever?).
> Your ecosystem has real problems that affect real people. It’s time to stop ignoring them.
I completely agree. The “out of scope” meme may have been holding Wayland back. We need much more standardization, akin to the XDG standards. There’s still a lot to do.