Except accessibility, Wayland has been a huge upgrade over X11.
Much better security isolation, proper HDR, full multi-monitor support, full VRR support, better application scaling, no screen tearing and reduced latency. (The clipboard also works fine)
Without Wayland I would not be on Linux right now.
The graphics stack is better, but the security isolation is IMHO solving a problem no one really had, at the cost of breaking a bunch of integration mechanisms people actually used.
You want UI security isolation for something like Android, where most software being run is fundamentally opposed to the interests of the user and wants to steal anything not nailed down, and you also contain things at the file system level. If Facebook could screenshot every other app all the time it absolutely would, and people would download it anyway. To some extent the enforceable promise that it can’t do that is why people are still willing to download it anyway and let it do all the other things it does to compromise a system.
In a distro shipping legitimate software, isolation at the desktop UI level is nice for defense in depth, but not really drawing a real security boundary around any program to the point where a user can trust a machine with malicious software running. It doesn’t matter if I can’t steal Firefox’s pixels if I can echo"export PATH=$HOME/.evil-firefox/bin:$PATH" >>~/.bashrc.
Except accessibility, Wayland has been a huge upgrade over X11.
Much better security isolation, proper HDR, full multi-monitor support, full VRR support, better application scaling, no screen tearing and reduced latency. (The clipboard also works fine)
Without Wayland I would not be on Linux right now.
The graphics stack is better, but the security isolation is IMHO solving a problem no one really had, at the cost of breaking a bunch of integration mechanisms people actually used.
You want UI security isolation for something like Android, where most software being run is fundamentally opposed to the interests of the user and wants to steal anything not nailed down, and you also contain things at the file system level. If Facebook could screenshot every other app all the time it absolutely would, and people would download it anyway. To some extent the enforceable promise that it can’t do that is why people are still willing to download it anyway and let it do all the other things it does to compromise a system.
In a distro shipping legitimate software, isolation at the desktop UI level is nice for defense in depth, but not really drawing a real security boundary around any program to the point where a user can trust a machine with malicious software running. It doesn’t matter if I can’t steal Firefox’s pixels if I can
echo "export PATH=$HOME/.evil-firefox/bin:$PATH" >>~/.bashrc.