StillBored (u/StillBored)

StillBored commented on KDE going all-in on a Wayland future blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/... · Posted by u/dualogy

The 1996 extension had severe limitations. Untrusted clients have no clipboard, but also no GPU acceleration at all and other features were barely tested using it so it was somewhat random if they would work. It breaks a ton of applications and was therefore used by approximately no one.

StillBored · 17 days ago

Ok, so instead of a couple UAC style prompts for screen readers, macro recording, desktop sharing, etc, and some tweaks to GDK, we got what? An entire new backend GDK windowing system, and a pile of broken applications? And its been decades?

And its not like actual flaws people found couldn't be fixed.

There is a word for this.

StillBored commented on KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support phoronix.com/news/KDE-Pla... · Posted by u/mikece

gary_0 · 20 days ago

> what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it

1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes, passwords, or the contents of any other window. Fixing this would break all existing X11 applications.

2. Performance - X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics, requiring hacks to get around. X11 is basically stuck with this legacy.

The ground-up re-design of X11 to fix those two issues is Wayland.

StillBored · 17 days ago

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht...

Is the security extension from 1996, which has a section on keyboard security

and its crazy to me that this anyone can claim X11 can't be off loaded, which its been doing for decades. From all the crazy blt/pattern HW acceleration to GL/vulcan implementations to the fact that the entire server can be on the other side of a network pipe, meaning it could be anywhere, including entirely encapsulated on a graphics card/smart nic/etc.

And if your talking about the xlib serialization, that was largely fixed with XCB.

StillBored commented on KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support phoronix.com/news/KDE-Pla... · Posted by u/mikece

hatmanstack · 20 days ago

Nah mate, it's all about the Wayland Trust model. No keylogging, consent-based screen recording, and no window spying. Isolation.

StillBored · 17 days ago

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht...

Notice the date.. 1996

(for those that didn't click the link, that is the X11 security extension which address all that, and it was published ~30 years ago).

StillBored commented on KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support phoronix.com/news/KDE-Pla... · Posted by u/mikece

StillBored · 17 days ago

The KDE blog entry reads like a modern political platform denying climate change, or claiming renewable energy can replace traditional energy sources on the grid.

One head strictly stuck in the ground and ignoring the cases that make many of those statements flatly false. Like for example, the nvidia support. Nvidia support in Linux is in the 'good luck' catalog, especially on any optimus laptop, where one is lucky if the power management works, much less multiple screen docking/undocking, and a heap of other issues. Then please clarify which actual driver stack one is running (nouveau vs provide by nvidia binaries, vs nvidia open source) To claim its great with wayland ignores core failures that still exist.

Its the same with X11 forwarding, which like copy paste, has been steady degrading to the point where all the dbus/etc services being depended on makes double digit percentages of applications not work with 'ssh -X' and oh wow, waypipe. It seems all of windows/osx and KDE/Gnome are steadily shooting themselves in the foot.

I'm sorta happy I pulled my financial support not long ago, there are a couple 'toxic' people in the distro DE community who are pushing their own agendas, everyone else be damned. And weirdly enough it seems those people aren't doing it for some corporate/whatever reason, but just to wave a flag about their accomplishments. The entire reason most people claim wayland is 'better' is largely FUD, but that doesn't stop the true believers.

StillBored commented on KDE going all-in on a Wayland future blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/... · Posted by u/dualogy

eddyb · 17 days ago

> So what was the screenshot feature of X11?

In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature. Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client.

> Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?

I am not familiar with DE-agnostic "screenshot apps" for Linux, they always seemed more common on other OSes, and I've always used the DE-specific apps (which were the first to support such mechanisms, some of them even using more direct DE-specific private protocols instead of XDG Portals).

But I spent a few seconds googling for general screenshot apps, found Flameshot (which makes sense as a cross-platform app), and it turns out that support for the XDG Portal approach was added to it almost 5 years ago:

https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/1272

And if you peek around the diff, you can tell that KDE/GNOME-specific support, on Wayland - using DBus but not the XDG Portals protocol - already existed, in early 2021, in fact...

https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/commit/a5df852268...

That's the commit that added KDE/GNOME-specific Wayland screenshot support.

8 years ago, in a 3rd-party app!

> Why can't the infrastructure include the user simply allowing the app to continue to have access without a specialized infrastructure of app request (that requires updating the app)?

I'd forgotten that this happened, but for screensharing from a X11 client, someone already went through the trouble of emulating it (on top of the XDG Portals + PipeWire infrastructure):

https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xwaylandvideobridge/

It's only a temporary hack, and it only matters for X11 clients running under XWayland - if an app can run as a native Wayland client, it should have XDG Portals-based implementations of relevant features.

> What's with the downplaying "just" again? Have all the best or most popular apps been updated to ensure no disruption?

Am I downplaying, or are you describing a vague category of "the best or more popular apps" without giving examples?

I feel like it's too easy for some of this stuff to end up in FUD-like arguments without considering the objective reality (of how far we've come in the past few years etc.).

Anyway, my subjective take is that X11 took a decade or two too long to die, and most (if not all) gripes users might have with Wayland can be traced back to X11 outliving its UNIX Workstation origins and having never been designed as a Personal Computing graphical environment.

StillBored · 17 days ago

> In case I wasn't clear enough, there was never a screenshot feature. Any X11 client could read any pixel written by any other X11 client.

Which is a load of FUD, the X11 security extensions from (checks google) 1996, restrict this.

StillBored commented on DIY NAS: 2026 Edition blog.briancmoses.com/2025... · Posted by u/sashk

StillBored · 18 days ago

ECC! I don't care what BS people say about ZFS/Btrfs/whatever, if a bit flips on your router hopefully the checksum fails and nothing bad happens.

If you flip a bit in memory, on the way to the disk, then its corrupt at rest, and future reads will likely propagate the error.

Sure, who cares, a glitch here/there in your kids first birthday video. Better hope the glitch is there, rather than in say the bit of code computing the sector offsets/whatever.

Stories like this hit the media every couple years, so if it can happen on the big fancy EMC/whatever then it can happen on your little NAS in the closet.

So, just pay the little extra for the CPU+MB+RAM that protects your data from the NIC all the way to the HD.

StillBored commented on Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 qualcomm.com/developer/bl... · Posted by u/mfilion

3836293648 · 19 days ago

How is Asahi not native?

StillBored · 18 days ago

Asahi is also still a platform with a huge pile of out of tree patches on top because the platform itself is pretty unusual, requiring for example, a 16K page size kernel which is unlike pretty much every other arm Linux platform.

StillBored commented on Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 qualcomm.com/developer/bl... · Posted by u/mfilion

StillBored · 18 days ago

I was going to write a snarky comment, but in the "if any of Qualcomm leadership is listening" I'm going ask a question:

Why is any of this needed when the kernel is full of platforms that are forward compatible with the Linux kernel and boot and generally operate on day one, without a huge pile of changes?

What does it benefit the user to have a huge pile of proprietary implementations of devices they frankly don't care about? Ex: just about anything related to power management? Why can't QC adhere to industry standards when they implement standard devices, ex: USB? Why can't these platforms adhere to industry standard firmware interfaces rather than custom mailbox interfaces?

StillBored commented on TSA to charge $18 fee for travelers without Real ID or passport washingtonpost.com/travel... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

quartesixte · 23 days ago

God I had forgotten how old this law is. And how consistently it has been delayed for decades. Born of the post 9/11 world and its concerns...

StillBored · 23 days ago

And generally considered unconstitutional, until suddenly it wasn't, just like GWB nationalizing the TSA itself thereby creating the single largest case of the federal government pilfering through everyday Americans persons and property hunting for things that are legal to own. Which was also wildly considered unconstitutional, until it wasn't.

And go read the 4th amendment, with the understand that no one who signed it thought anything in the constitution authorizes any part of the federal government to ignore the absolutist language the bill of rights is written in. The assumption was that if there arose a need to justify the federal government searching people like this it needed a super majority to pass an amendment to fix it.

StillBored commented on TSA to charge $18 fee for travelers without Real ID or passport washingtonpost.com/travel... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

hermanzegerman · 23 days ago

Why do they need to identify you for a domestic flight anyway?

In Europe I don't need to show ID for flights inside the Schengen Area. You go through security, they check your luggage and it's done.

There is no legitimate reason for the government to identify you on a domestic flight

StillBored · 23 days ago

Right, and the reason this has been going on for nearly a quarter century in the USA is because it was widely considered an unconstitutional national passport until 9-11, and got bipartisan push-back from a number of states following its passage.

The federal government passed it along with the authoritarian wishlists various agencies had been salivating over for 40+ years and unable to get passed, until under the guise of saving us from the 'terrorists', who now 25 years later, turned out the actual terrorists were probably just domestic authoritarians. The guys living in caves weren't really a threat and could be dealt with, without passing a bunch of stuff to affect every single citizen of the country.