On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 11:38 AM Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan@gmail.com wrote:

As I understand it, X11 will still be installable, though I don't know how long that will last.

I think the only long-term hope for those of us that require capabilities that X11 provides (and Wayland does not) is that either Red Hat and/or Fedora reverse their decision and decide to continue providing X11, or that rpmfusion steps in to fill the void.

Of course it is also possible that as Wayland gets more usage the need to address missing capabilities will become apparent and the shortcomings will be addressed.

Barry writes:

The problem is no one is maintaining the X11 code.

All the people that used to work on X11 moved on to wayland after it became very clear that X11’s design was preventing implementation of features that end users wanted.

So if you stick on X11 you will be running code that is unmaintained.

This is definitely a problem if this means that security vulnerabilities don't get addressed, or if new hardware is unsupported by the existing code.

As long as …well… the code works, I don't really know what I'm missing without Wayland. I definitely know what I'll be missing with Wayland, though.

George N. White III writes:

I definitely know what I'll be missing with Wayland, though.

There are things Wayland won't permit (xeyes), and things that are yet to

implemented.  The latter may not get much attention if they aren't considered important by large enterprises.  Colleagues in large enterprises have moved  to Web-based interfaces (jupyter, sagemath, and rstudio are examples).

And they probably hire the same rocket scientists who occasionally insert well-publicized security hole in public-facing web-based administration pages for various routers.

And I guess none of those enterprises manage headless boxes by ssh-ing into them and running firewall-config, and other tools, with tunneled X.

Don't get me wrong – I also use VNC. Over a tunneled ssh connection.

Wolfgang Pfeiffer via users writes:

I can't buy these repeatedly and ad nauseam asserted ideas of x11/xorg vulnerabilities as an excuse for dumping the Xorg/X11 system as a whole.

I don't see much value is discussing the validity of those excuses. It is what it is. They don't want to work on X any more. That's their choice to make. Yes, various excuses are offered to explain the lack of interest in maintaining X, that ring hollow. But I see nothing to be gained from continously harping on it.

Over at Openbsd they have an X based on X.org that is probably tons more secure than the ones on any Linux system ever: https://xenocara.org/

So I don't see any technical problems as to why the Linux devs could not port that X version from Openbsd to Linux systems, if X11/Xorg were really that vulnerable - at least as long as Wayland isn't ready.

No need for a reverse port. If one or more volunteers emerge, step up, and pick up maintainance and effectively fork X.org then at that point the community at large will have a viable option to choose. And then the mob will decide who survives the fork.

This has happened before.

X.org itself was forked off Xfree86.

gcc was, at one time, forked.

It's the hypocrisy that drove me away from what Linux is today. Not even so much the techical side of the OS: the Linux sponsors or maintainers could tell me that they don't want to spend resources to maintain Xorg additionally to wayland - I'd be fine with it, more or less: there are other options than Linux. But to see the whole Xorg thing getting dumped as long as wayland isn't ready hurts. And it is - to put it very mildly - incomprehensible to me.

It's not going to get dumped by anyone. Anyone can still grab the source of x.org and rebuild it.

If we build a new house, because the old one isn't safe anymore, is leaking or just lousy, we destroy the old one only if and when the new one is ready to live in, i.e. if we have a new place where we can live

• a no-brainer, actually.

Good luck, guys!

best.

PS: And besides: there's even work done on wayland over at Openbsd: https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2023-matthieu-wayland-openbsd.pdf -- Wolfgang -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of- conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora- infrastructure/new_issue

On Mon, Apr 22, 2024 at 12:01:58PM +0200, Wolfgang Pfeiffer via users wrote:

On Sun, Apr 21, 2024 at 10:00:02AM -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:

...

Wolfgang Pfeiffer via users writes:

...

I can't buy these repeatedly and ad nauseam asserted ideas of x11/xorg vulnerabilities as an excuse for dumping the Xorg/X11 system as a whole.

I don't see much value is discussing the validity of those excuses. It is what it is. They don't want to work on X any more. [ ... ]

Xorg is still being maintained and patched, it seems:

Forgot to mention: it's not exactly clear to me what you mean to say by /"They" don't want to work on X any more/

But anyways: Hoping the links are helpful.

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-commit/ https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/

-- Wolfgang

On Mon Apr22'24 07:36:16AM, Sam Varshavchik wrote:

From: Sam Varshavchik mrsam@courier-mta.com Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 07:36:16 -0400 To: Community support for Fedora users users@lists.fedoraproject.org Reply-To: Community support for Fedora users users@lists.fedoraproject.org Subject: Re: The best way to still use Fedora + Xorg + Gnome ... even after version 40

Wolfgang Pfeiffer via users writes:

...

On Mon, Apr 22, 2024 at 12:01:58PM +0200, Wolfgang Pfeiffer via users wrote:

...

On Sun, Apr 21, 2024 at 10:00:02AM -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:

...

Wolfgang Pfeiffer via users writes:

...

I can't buy these repeatedly and ad nauseam asserted ideas of x11/xorg vulnerabilities as an excuse for dumping the Xorg/X11 system as a whole.

I don't see much value is discussing the validity of those excuses. It is what it is. They don't want to work on X any more. [ ... ]

Xorg is still being maintained and patched, it seems:

Forgot to mention: it's not exactly clear to me what you mean to say by /"They" don't want to work on X any more/

It has been stated, repeatedly, that the X.org maintainers have no desire to do any further development on X11, and they are only working on Wayland.

...

But anyways: Hoping the links are helpful.

...

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-commit/ https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/

It's certainly possible that an occasional patch/minor fix gets committed. But it's been reportedly, repeatedly, that "they" don't want to work on X11 any more. If you go back to the top of this thread you will find that stated by more than one person, who's in position to know.

Btw, does all this discussion about F40 dropping support for X11 mean that openbox (the window manager, also behind LXDE) also stop working with F40?

Many thanks, Ranjan

On Mon Apr22'24 09:05:51PM, Samuel Sieb wrote:

From: Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 21:05:51 -0700 To: users@lists.fedoraproject.org Reply-To: Community support for Fedora users users@lists.fedoraproject.org Subject: Re: The best way to still use Fedora + Xorg + Gnome ... even after version 40

On 4/22/24 20:57, Ranjan Maitra via users wrote:

...

Btw, does all this discussion about F40 dropping support for X11 mean that openbox (the window manager, also behind LXDE) also stop working with F40?

F40 isn't dropping support for X11. The big thing about F40 is that the Fedora KDE Plasma 6 is dropping support for X11. But there are some people that are going to maintain the X11 support separately so you can still use it if you want.

There are still some window managers that don't support Wayland (yet) and those will continue to work with X11.

I don't know why Gnome is in the subject. I haven't seen any mention of support being dropped so I believe there's still X11 support, although I haven't used it (X11) for a long time, other than XWayland.

My apologies for my confusion, and thank you for the clarification. I really like using my WM (openbox) and am glad to know that I can still continue to use that. (However, I think that openbox may not be ported to Wayland, if I understood correctly what was discussed some time ago in that mailing list.)

Best wishes, Ranjan

On Sat, 2024-04-20 at 19:48 -0300, George N. White III wrote:

There are things Wayland won't permit (xeyes), and things that are yet to implemented.

No xeyes? Who doesn't want a pair of googlie eyes goofily staring at their mouse pointer?

Actually, I do have a pair of them on this PC, I use them from time-to- time to find the mouse when the pointer has gone darting off in weird directions for inexplicable reasons. And they, and a clock with ticking seconds, are a good indicator that the computer has or hasn't crashed when you it goes unresponsive to your commands.

Jokes aside, when something doesn't do what you want (whatever that may be), why would you use it? Promises that the feature you want may appear in a few years mean nothing to me. It's no good to me know, and is akin to the lie told to patients in hospitals that "the doctor will see you shortly," when you know damn well they ain't gonna, because they're elsewhere and nobody has even asked them to come see you.

And if they do add all the features you want back in, you're back to using the product they've trashed to take its place (with new sets of security problems). You may as well have worked on the original product and fixed it. Wayland smacks of "I didn't invent it."

The latter may not get much attention if they aren't considered important by large enterprises.

Hmm, I seem to recall Linux as being anti-establishment. And mostly run by actual users not corporate shills.

If people are going to turn it into Windows you may as well use Windows. I've never understood that mentality. We picked Linux precisely because it wasn't.

Colleagues in large enterprises have moved to Web-based interfaces (jupyter, sagemath, and rstudio are examples).

I notice banks have always done that kind of thing. The teller's terminal was either simply a text console, and they tabbed between things on the form, or menued over to other forms, which virtually any computer could do. Or, these days, it's a web browser, and one has to hope that it's on a completely private network. Because we know how secure browsers aren't.

But I've yet to see an email interface in a web page, as just one example, that's not vastly inferior to a real email client.

On Sat, 20 Apr 2024, George N. White III wrote:

There are things Wayland won't permit (xeyes), and things that are yet to implemented. The latter may not get much attention if they aren't

I'll bite: Wassa matter with xeyes?

On Thu, 2024-04-25 at 16:00 -0500, Michael Hennebry wrote:

I'll bite: Wassa matter with xeyes?

My guess would be that something monitoring mouse movements when those mouse movements could be related to another app is considered insecure. Well, *I* would consider it insecure if any app could see what I was doing with the mouse at any time.

e.g. On screen keyboards for password entry. Or those /draw a shape/ with your mouse instead of typing a password.

Once home computers went away from being an isolated box (with no network, and no exchange of any data in any way with other devices), more thought needs to go into the design of everything running on it.

Tim: (re xeyes)

...

My guess would be that something monitoring mouse movements when those mouse movements could be related to another app is considered insecure. Well, *I* would consider it insecure if any app could see what I was doing with the mouse at any time.

Michael Hennebry:

Not obvious. Presumably most GUIs would need to monitor the mouse. Presumably most GUIs would be started by the owner of the mouse. If xeyes is not allowed, presumably gnome-screenshot --include-pointer is not allowed either. If the issue is looking outside one's window, presumably gnome-screenshot is not allowed at all.

I'm thinking more in principle than specifics... If xeyes could do it, so could something else, so one might forbid the practice in general. Which leaves you with two approaches, allowing certain exceptions, or never allowing dual monitoring of movements. Which one would be easier and safer?

It's one thing to observe the mouse has moved, to nudge the screensaver timer, for instance. But it's another thing to track the movements precisely.

Tangentially related, nefarious keylogging springs to mind. If only one thing at a time could monitor what you type, and nothing else could pretend to be a keyboard and pass them through, software key loggers would be harder to implement. Your key entries only going into what you intend them to. Something that tried to intercept them would apparently stop the keyboard from working - your typing wouldn't appear where you expected it to, as you typed.

Of course that would break global hotkeys, and on-screen keyboards.

Ideas about security always seem to mess up something else. SELinux is like that.

With X being a completely unmaintainable mess, all new and bugfix development stopped about 2 years ago.  Most disturbing is that for the last 2 years there have been essentially no security fixes as a result.  A couple of distros have done some critical bugfixes to try to keep the dead horse alive, but its been on life support for a long time now.  Every distro announced a long time ago that X support would end, and to move on and redesign for Wayland. Some of the original X developers started Wayland as X reimagined 45 year later for the 21st century needs. However, given that absolutely everyone today has compute power on their desk and everyone has a gpu for things like compositing instead of what was available back when X was designed, they made some major architectural decisions that will affect some people, like dropping remote app windows in favour of remote desktops.   As far as I'm aware there are no distros with plans to try to keep on building X.  Its dead.  Today, Wayland can do most of the things that it was envisioned to do, with Fedora probably being the one with the most up-to-date implementation.  Good luck in your search for an up-to-date distro knowingly shipping big security holes today.  Maybe you can keep using an old distro release and airgap your entire inboard network and use X without interacting with the rest of the net as a way out of your dilemma.

On 2024-04-17 11:37 a.m., Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:

On Wed, 2024-04-17 at 14:00 +0200, Dario Lesca wrote:

...

Ok my notebook I work with Fedora from Core 1 with Gnome on Xorg-x11

I would like to continue to work with Gnome on Xorg-x11 ... even after version 40

What is the best way to do that without change distro?

As I understand it, X11 will still be installable, though I don't know how long that will last.

poc

---

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On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 03:30:32PM GMT, Go Canes wrote:

On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 1:48 PM John Mellor john.mellor@gmail.com wrote:

...

With X being a completely unmaintainable mess, all new and bugfix development stopped about 2 years ago. Most disturbing is that for the last 2 years there have been essentially no security fixes as a result.

I have heard that there have been no security fixes, and also that there have. I understand that there is little to no "development" in the X11 space, but as a mature product it doesn't need development so much as a proper "X12".

There have been some security updates... but no releases.

Wayland is pretty much what all the X developers wanted to make. They didn't want to call it X12 as it would mistakenly give people the impression it worked the same way/was like X11.

...snip...

2. Given the limitations of 1, what I have read regarding remote app

support seemed to boil down to "we don't want to bother, use VNC/RDP/etc."

Well, depends on what you need. waypipe works quite well if you just want to run a wayland app on machine A and display it on wayland display B.

kevin

On 4/17/24 17:37, Mike Wright wrote:

From what I read X11 suffered from mission creep and a lot of features that should have been in the

windowmanagers

ended up in X11 and will never

be in Wayland.

Suse Shi writes:

»from my exprience, fedora xfce spin is a good choice for old hardware, and I'm using fedora+xfce for desktop 10yrs+.

The XFCE spin is also a pretty good choice for new hardware, too.

On Thu, Apr 18, 2024 at 07:27:21AM GMT, Tim via users wrote:

On Wed, 2024-04-17 at 13:47 -0400, John Mellor wrote:

...

However, given that absolutely everyone today has compute power on their desk and everyone has a gpu for things like compositing instead of what was available back when X was designed

Bullshit!

Feel free to disagree, but do try and be respectful and constructive.

kevin

On 04/17/2024 11:08 AM, t_pol@tiscali.it wrote:

I'm on fedora since years. If they'll completely drop X11, I need to change distro. Any suggestion on which distro is good for continuing to use the "VERY OLD" X11/Mwm ? Thanks

And so will I along with everybody using Xfce as I don't know if there are even any plans yet to make it Wayland compatible.

On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 2:14 PM Tom Horsley horsley1953@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:56:44 -0600 Joe Zeff wrote:

...

And so will I along with everybody using Xfce as I don't know if there are even any plans yet to make it Wayland compatible.

Has Wayland (or the compositor, or whatever they imagine is responsible) got the ability yet to remap keyboard keys, mouse buttons, etc?

I had one computer I wanted to keep on Wayland, and it forced me to create this ridiculous project so I could do draglock on my trackball:

https://tomhorsley.com/hardware/mouse-tailor/mouse-tailor.html

Wayland is still pretty immature when compared to X11. It would be nice if Wayland was more mature before we are forced to switch to it.

Wayland also cannot disable the trackpad on a laptop when the mouse is plugged in. That bug has been open for years.

Jeff

Jeffrey Walton writes:

Wayland is still pretty immature when compared to X11. It would be nice if Wayland was more mature before we are forced to switch to it.

The question on everyone's mind is: well, here's a video card that works fine with X. It's 5-10 years old, one of mine is even older. What are the chances that Wayland actually supports it.

I'm stocking up on popcorn, waiting to see what happens with everyone who's using nvidia's binary X drivers.

Wayland also cannot disable the trackpad on a laptop when the mouse is plugged in. That bug has been open for years.

Can it at least disable the infernal tap to click?

On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 11:56:44AM GMT, Joe Zeff wrote:

On 04/17/2024 11:08 AM, t_pol@tiscali.it wrote:

...

I'm on fedora since years. If they'll completely drop X11, I need to change distro. Any suggestion on which distro is good for continuing to use the "VERY OLD" X11/Mwm ? Thanks

And so will I along with everybody using Xfce as I don't know if there are even any plans yet to make it Wayland compatible.

There are: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

basically, the plan is to have prelim support in the next release (4.20) and refine/improve it after that.

kevin