• thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I mean if it’s goal was to prevent scripts from using the graphics env maliciously then it seems to have made some progress if you can’t even automate it with good intentions

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      2 months ago

      We need to keep a balance between security and convenience, to avoid systems becoming too awkward to use. Wayland tipped this balance too far on the side of security. Malicious local exploitation of the graphics stack has never been a big issue; consider the fact that someone or something would need to compromise your own account locally, at which point they could do much worse things than moving your windows around. It’s not that the security threat doesn’t exist, it’s that Wayland has approached it at the wrong end and killed a lot of useful functionality in the process.

      Also consider that this issue has existed for the entire history of desktop graphics on *nix and nobody has ever deemed it worth to destroy automation for it. If it were such a grave security hole surely someone would have raised the alarm and fixed it during all this time.

      My opinion is that Wayland has been using this as a red herring, to bolster its value proposition.