Hacker Read top | best | new | newcomments | leaders | about | bookmarklet login

> which meant a lack of security (allowing all apps full access to spy on the entire screen)

I really do not care if an application that I installed can "spy" on my screen. It can execute arbitrary code on my machine. My security concerns no longer exist.

I really hope developers will abandon wayland, policykit, rtkit, dbus, systemd, and the rest of the overkill that now unnecessarily introduces bugs and complexity into the Linux desktop. My laptop shouldn't need an entire distributed system to let me click some buttons in a GUI.

Maybe the problem is we let corporations like RedHat and Ubuntu tell us how the desktop should work (it's their developers introducing all this crap). Maybe it's time to start over.



sort by: page size:

>you want to facilitate the bad user habits of Windows, iOS, Android, etc on the Linux desktop

They are not bad user habits. They are only bad if the system is poorly designed. Unfortunately, the Linux desktop was poorly designed and the community is taking their sweet time to fix it.

>Why do you even want to use the Linux desktop in the first place if you prefer those systems?

It's just what I am used to using. I ackowledge the security of my computer sucks and I could be easily pwned at any time.

>trying to assimilate the niche holdout systems like some sort desktop borg.

I want the Linux desktop to be viable to use. Having competitive security compared to other operating systems is important. People shouldn't have to worry that using a Linux desktop will mean that a bad program can steal all of their accounts or delete all the files they have been working on. These type of things are preventable by the system and just blaming people that they should have known that what they downloaded was malware even if it is not at all obvious.


> I don't have a security problem with my Linux Desktop as of right now.

Matthew Garrett (who does internal Linux desktop security at Google) gave a great talk at GUADEC about the current state of Linux desktops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUa-nnjjQcc

TLDR: It's not good. User-level processes have free, unrestricted access to all of your data, unless you use Wayland and desktop containerization.


> And i moved away from Windows to get away from that crap.

This is the dilemma of The Linux Desktop (pick Ubuntu, GNOME, systemd, or all of them). Things like internationalization, plug and play, network configuration, are all important to provide. Trying to provide them to the demographic of people that use Microsoft Windows ends up with solutions that resemble those of Microsoft Windows. Meanwhile power users and developers get alienated and end up implementing those things in a far more efficient and efficient to use way. Running Emacs as my X11 window manager gives me far better internationalization capabilities than GNOME. xmodmap is a better way to configure the keyboard than the GUI tools in GNOME and LXDE (no more worries about losing configuration on updates, for one). Linux web browser video playback and font antialiasing has been such a great feature that I now do half of my browsing with w3m (through emacs-w3m) with the X11 misc-fixed fonts. It is faster to connect to wireless networks using OpenBSD's ifconfig than it is to use nm-applet. The list just goes on - who even needs desktop notifications? Do all projects that try to be "user friendly," like GNOME and Ubuntu and systemd, end up being power user unfriendly?


> Yes, not every random app and feature you use on Xorg will have a Wayland equivalent. Deal with it.

This attitude right here is why I don't use desktop Linux anymore. I'm tired of caring about my system components, instead of just using them.


> I don’t know how I feel about Wayland.

Me neither. On the one hand I switched over 2 years ago and it worked fine for the most part, there a still a few things missing. One of the things were headless displays and it seems like there will be something like that in GNOME 40 - though probably experimental.

What bothers me most is that innovation is so difficult. Everything needs to be standardized first and then implemented in all different desktops like KDE and GNOME each in their own way. And this process is extremly slow. Back in the Xorg days many cool programs were made by independent users (for sceensharing, automation etc.). Writing a new Desktop or porting over one from X is almost impossible, were it not for wlroots. I wonder if we are not sacrificing too much in the name of security (OK an evil program can not keygrab and control other windows, but it can still read all my SSH keys etc.).


> Unfortunately the GUI is a bit convoluted, because it exposes every option that you can change

Wow, color me surprised. That doesn't sound like a desktop Linux app at all :)

>I once almost bricked my LG monitor, because I accidentally locked the hardware buttons on my monitor, via an undocumented manufacturer specific option.

Reminds of the good old days of late 90s / early 2000s desktop Linux, when the wrong video timing settings in your XFree86 config could make your CRT monitor (almost literally) explode.

But I'm sure 2022 will be "the year of Linux on the desktop", finally :)


> I feel like some Linux users (like me) stop noticing the jank over time since we slowly become very adept at coping with it (eg. finding good resources on how to solve the problem so we can find the fix pretty quickly, or just knowing the fix out of experience.

I think that holds true for anything honestly. I never cared much about how annoying it is to install EXEs on windows, visiting each website, clicking through another dialog etc. Neither did I care about the GUI.

Now that I'm using Linux on my personal devices however, I got to like package managers and tiling WMs.


> Doesn't he realise that no one gives a shit about Linux desktop apps?

That explains the sad state of Linux on the desktop.


> Security? My whole $HOME is readable and writeable to just about any application I run; using Wayland is like locking my windows but leaving my front door wide open.

Exactly. Like, holy moly did the people working on Wayland get carried away by the mobile OS world. And second system syndrome too probably. I'm using $DISTRO because I trust them enough to not package spyware/malware in their repos. I know it's not 100% safe, there have been and will be security bugs that don't get fixed in a timely manner, or even ones that got introduced by distro-specific patches in the first place, but holy hell my OSS desktop is not a proprietary smartphone OS loaded with random closed-source apps from god knows who that tries to steal my data for profit. If I get pwned then it's certainly not through my display server.

I mean, eventually, like always, the open source world will get its shit together, and Wayland will probably become usable, but we only recently kinda solved the whole screen recording issue.

A few weeks ago I wanted to have a simple script, that would quickly switch between a couple display configurations. With X11 that was dead simple by using xrandr. It works with every DE/WM on this planet. You'd assume there's an equivalent tool for Wayland. But mumble mumble security, you cannot do that, so we got the same f#+ing situation as with screen recording again, every WM/compositor comes up with their own solution to something absolutely trivial. GNOME/Mutter have a dbus-API, wlroots-based ones have "wlrandr" via some protocol extension, KWIN I didn't even bother checking. But it's only 15 years since the project started right, why should something trivial as this have been settled upon yet? I even stumbled upon a discussion in an issue tracker that I cannot find just now where Wayland devs argued that you don't even want something like that. Like, go working for Apple with that mindset.

Give it another 10 years, and it might be ready to serve more than the absolutely trivial average Joe use-case.


> Sadly, a whole host of issues specific to my dev environment meant that it was useless as I’d spend more time fixing it than getting any valuable use out of it.

Sounds like last time I tried Linux on the desktop.


> Trouble is, that security model makes no sense on today's desktop.

At least some users disagree. Flatpak and snap run applications in sandbox. I am to used for open source software, I fear installing closed source like Opera, MS Edge (not supported on Linux yet), Steam. And Steam with Proton is the next thing to bring Linux on the desktop.

Why are you comparing X11 and Wayland?

If something does not work on X.Org we are better with another project than with nothing. If Chrome and Zoom work on X.Org stick to it.


> As a former gnu/linux user, I see no point to have it on a desktop.

Except, of course, software freedom.


>Let me choose my own apps rather than trying to be a kitchen sink with its own default apps: >Windows lets me disable optional components, why not GNOME?

Because that isn't in-line with the Gnome devs' vision, or how they want you to use Gnome. If you don't agree with their vision, then why are you using their software?

If you want a desktop environment that lets you configure it the way you want and disable things you don't want, Gnome simply isn't the DE for you. I really don't understand why this is so difficult a concept for so many Linux users. It's been like this for well over 10 years now (Gnome3 was released in 2011), it's not something new. The Gnome devs have infamously been hostile to users who want to do things differently from their vision.


>If I need elevated privileges it's always a one-off job, which means I need a commandline anyway.

This is why polkit actions are the way they are, so you actually have a chance of being able to encode those one-off tasks into permissions for a GUI. It's not implemented for everything that requires root, and it probably won't ever be implemented for all of it but it's a lot better than it used to be. Part of it is improving because desktops like KDE made it easier to plug in new panels to the system settings, another part is that applications started using the higher level D-Bus APIs (like udisks2, timedated, networkmanager, etc) instead of trying to access the raw devices themselves.

>There's a bunch of influential people that are bent on making "Linux desktop" be something that competes effectively with Windows and MacOS. Setting aside that I don't think those are particularly desirable objectives in the first place, I simply don't see it happening. Despite their deficiencies, Windows and MacOS work better than Linux desktops.

I don't disagree with the last part here but, companies like Canonical exist and they get paid to ship this stuff. There are customers out there who want this, and they may very well be the ones paying some money or contributing maintenance towards keeping your browser and media player working on Linux. I don't know any overarching reason why these customers would deploy Linux instead of Windows, you would have to ask them.

>I realise that my usage pattern isn't universal; I was just correcting the claim that "all desktops use it". You only need one counterexample to refute such a claim.

Sorry but I don't think any usage of the terminal is a counterexample. That's just sidestepping the desktop, you could also do that from a VT with no GUI present.


> Well, if you use Gnome, for example, good luck getting the developers stick to your prefered features either...

Gnome was one of the first environments I quit, with extreme prejudice. Even now, mentioning the word Gnome makes me feel a little bit of anger. Fuck Gnome.

> Well, you can have that, but in exchange for a quite simplified and barebones experience.

That's right. I don't need much more than what Windows 95 offers, plus workspaces.

> And then you'll still have the same problems with the apps you use, like browsers...

My IDE started doing this, but luckily I could just go back to an older version.

For my browsers, I have indeed been frustrated, so I switched to a browser which doesn't pull that kind of shit.


> Of course, but is it more annoying than using Windows all the time?

In a word: yes.

I have at different points used Windows, Linux, and OS X as primary desktop operating systems, so I am not operating from a sense of total ignorance of what other systems are like.

My experience with Linux was that I needed to do far more configuration because lots of hardware wouldn't work right out of the box and needed a lot of tweaking and digging through Linux forums for someone with the same problem. I'm really not interested in doing that kind of thing on my personal computer anymore.


> They got rid of the idea of the X protocol and network transparency.

> I like being able to log in to remove Linux machines, and run programs that show up locally on my desktop.

I sure don't. I've had terrible experiences with this and end up going with VNC for any sufficiently complicated program (Firefox, Matlab, Cadence).


>don’t want to manage every nitty-gritty detail of the security and privacy of my computer.

Good Linux distros have sane defaults managed by volunteers for you, so on OSes that respect your freedom you still don't have to do this.


> Absolutely zero bullshit features installed and never changes things on its own.

That's it. For me, that's [unfortunately] the only "realistic" alternative out there, if one wouldn't mind the extra bucks, is somehow dependent on Windows environment and/or has no time to keep hacking and experiencing with Linux desktops.

I've grown to love Linux as a wonderful server OS, and as an occasional Desktop OS to play with on a VM. Unless you're a hacker (at both work and in your free time), it's hard to keep using Linux as a main daily Desktop OS.

next

Legal | privacy