# How to install Xorg without Wayland in FreeBSD?



## Spartrekus (Dec 30, 2018)

Hello,

I would like to avoid as much as possible wayland for the graphical (Xorg) installation.

Which possibilities might be given to exclude wayland during _pkg install Xorg_?

Thank you so much in advance!!

--
EDIT: wayland 1.16
FreeBSD 13. release


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## Beastie (Dec 30, 2018)

Spartrekus said:


> I would like to avoid as much as possible wayland for the graphical (Xorg) installation.
> 
> Which possibilities might be given to exclude wayland during _pkg install Xorg_?


Packages are built using the default port options. You can build your own from ports. Check out --disable-xwayland.



Spartrekus said:


> FreeBSD 13. release


There's no such a thing. 13 is -CURRENT. 12.0 is -RELEASE.


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 31, 2018)

How are you managing to install wayland with Xorg in the first place? I install from ports but it's an option, not a default.


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## Beastie (Dec 31, 2018)

Indeed, there's no trace of it in the package's MANIFEST either.


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## laurentis (Dec 31, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> How are you managing to install wayland with Xorg in the first place? I install from ports but it's an option, not a default.



In the 'latest' repository, the wayland option has been enabled by default since November. It will be the default in the upcoming quarterly update. It's only a 1Mb package, so not a big deal.


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## Spartrekus (Dec 31, 2018)

laurentis said:


> In the 'latest' repository, the wayland option has been enabled by default since November. It will be the default in the upcoming quarterly update. It's only a 1Mb package, so not a big deal.



Just pkg install xorg.
(PI3b+ with url)

The Port option sounds good and excellent appropriate way.

To see Wayland, pulseaudio,... and many "similar" stuffs will be quite big problem in some years, even it will take time to clean up in some years. Today, FreeBSD works well, fast, and it is reliable.
Better to keep the Unix philosophy, because we want that FreeBSD to be million times cleaner, secured, stable, and smaller than any other operating systems. Wayland little by little could likely become more popular.

I am not so sure that FreeBSD should give Wayland like this.

Maybe the components of an operating system (for the base,...) would like to focus on :

        1. To be so easy to use, configure, and as to require straightforward instruction.
        2. To be easy to compile and to maintain, and, if necessary, port to new platforms
           by people with relatively sufficiently good knowledge of C and UNIX.
        3. To have a minimum number of files to be dealt with, for compile
           and installation.
        4. To have enough functionality to be useful to a large number of
           people.

Good Luck


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## olli@ (Jan 2, 2019)

Wayland is now 10 years old. It is accepted as a standard, it's quite mature and getting more and more momentum. At some point the “classic” X11 display server will fall behind. So I'm not surprised that Wayland support is now enabled by default. It's just a question of time (i.e. not _if_, but _when_). Actually I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier.

If you want to run without Wayland support (for whatever reason), you're free to build from the Ports Collection yourself with the Wayland option disabled. However, I assume that at some point in the future Wayland will become mandatory. Not in the near future, though.


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## Spartrekus (Jan 2, 2019)

olli@ said:


> Wayland is now 10 years old. It is accepted as a standard, it's quite mature and getting more and more momentum. At some point the “classic” X11 display server will fall behind. So I'm not surprised that Wayland support is now enabled by default. It's just a question of time (i.e. not _if_, but _when_). Actually I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier.
> 
> If you want to run without Wayland support (for whatever reason), you're free to build from the Ports Collection yourself with the Wayland option disabled. However, I assume that at some point in the future Wayland will become mandatory. Not in the near future, though.



but then it will not be freebsd, but LinuxBSD ?  Away from descendant of Unix.


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## olli@ (Jan 2, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> but then it will not be freebsd, but LinuxBSD ?  Away from descendant of Unix.



I don't understand that comment, I'm afraid. Wayland has nothing to do with BSD vs. Linux. First of all, Wayland is a _display protocol_ (just like X11), and that's independent from operating systems.


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## Emrion (Jan 6, 2019)

I installed some times ago, a FreeBSD VM with xfce and firefox-63. All ran fine (12.0-RELEASE). Today, I installed sysutils/gksu with `pkg`. Among dependencies needed, there was wayland. After that, firefox refused to work: 


> ld-elf.so.1: /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so: Undefined symbol "gdk_wayland_display_get_type"



I tried to compile firefox (64) without wayland support but got this error:


> ===>  Configuring for p5-Locale-gettext-1.07
> env: /usr/local/bin/perl5.26.3: No such file or directory


(I have perl 5.26.2)

The worst thing is: if I try to deinstall wayland, it wants to also remove xfce!

Don't know if it is the future or not, I just see the damage...


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## Spartrekus (Jan 6, 2019)

Emrion said:


> I installed some times ago, a FreeBSD VM with xfce and firefox-63. All ran fine (12.0-RELEASE). Today, I installed sysutils/gksu with `pkg`. Among dependencies needed, there was wayland. After that, firefox refused to work:
> 
> 
> I tried to compile firefox (64) without wayland support but got this error:
> ...



That's good. Good example that Wayland will influence on X/Xorg/X11.

Really, *BSD should go to X environment which is like BASE (without LINUX!).


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## shkhln (Jan 6, 2019)

Emrion said:


> I installed some times ago, a FreeBSD VM with xfce and firefox-63. All ran fine (12.0-RELEASE). Today, I installed sysutils/gksu with `pkg`. Among dependencies needed, there was wayland. After that, firefox refused to work:



Pkg is a very flaky tool and doesn't handle partial updates well, `pkg upgrade` should fix dependency mismatch.



Spartrekus said:


> Wayland will kill X11.



Good riddance. (Also, X11 doesn't come from original UNIX.)


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## Emrion (Jan 6, 2019)

> Pkg is a very flaky tool and doesn't handle partial updates well,  pkg upgrade should fix dependency mismatch.



I have no doubt that pkg isn't perfect but it works almost always. I use it because the ports system is too slow on a VM (and to tell the truth, also on a real machine). But, as you can see, ports aren't perfect as well. 

And concerning `pkg upgrade`, I'd already tried. I have the last version of firefox from the pkg point of view.


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## shkhln (Jan 6, 2019)

Emrion said:


> And concerning `pkg upgrade`, I'd already tried. I have the last version of firefox from the pkg point of view.



No, you have successfully upgraded Firefox, but some of its _dependencies_ are stale. FWIW, I recently upgraded my desktop from 11.2 to 12.0, which required me running `pkg upgrade` and `pkg upgrade -f` about a dozen times. Try a bit harder.


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## Emrion (Jan 6, 2019)

The funny thing is that I have a similar VM with xfce, gksu of the same version and firefox 64 (I also tried to install firefox 64 with pkg but I get the same error about wayland). The difference is this VM do not have wayland installed and there is no problem.

This last VM comes from 11.1 -> 11.2 -> 12.0 (and there are many programs installed).
The VM with the "wayland issue" comes from 11.2 -> 12.0 (with few software  installed).

On the first, I installed gksu on the 11.1 version. On the second, It was on the 12.0. Useless to say that I have run `pkg upgrade -f` when I updated to 12.0. I don't recall exactly but I think I have deleted and reinstalled some pkg that didn't work after that or upgraded maybe.

So the next time I see wayland as dependency, I'll simply do not install the program that need it.


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## Spartrekus (Jan 6, 2019)

Emrion said:


> The funny thing is that I have a similar VM with xfce, gksu of the same version and firefox 64 (I also tried to install firefox 64 with pkg but I get the same error about wayland). The difference is this VM do not have wayland installed and there is no problem.
> 
> This last VM comes from 11.1 -> 11.2 -> 12.0 (and there are many programs installed).
> The VM with the "wayland issue" comes from 11.2 -> 12.0 (with few software  installed).
> ...



More interestingly, it seems that running wayland makes firefox slower:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1493493 (*inux).
Who really knows why Redhat, Gnome, Chromium, ... push in that direction.


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## shkhln (Jan 6, 2019)

Emrion said:


> So the next time I see wayland as dependency, I'll simply do not install the program that need it.



Don't be ridiculous. This a basic dependency resolution problem. If you don't know how to deal with them, they are going to bite you over and over and over again.


```
% grep gdk_wayland_display_get_type -r /usr/local/lib/*
Binary file /usr/local/lib/firefox/gtk2/libmozgtk.so matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/firefox/libxul.so matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libgdk-3.so matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libgdk-3.so.0 matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libgdk-3.so.0.2200.30 matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libgeany.so matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libgeany.so.0 matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libgeany.so.0.0.0 matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libgtk-3.so matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libgtk-3.so.0 matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libgtk-3.so.0.2200.30 matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37 matches
Binary file /usr/local/lib/libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37.33.6 matches
% readelf -s /usr/local/lib/libgdk-3.so | grep gdk_wayland_display_get_type
  1074: 00000000000d8410   127 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   13 gdk_wayland_display_get_type
% pkg which /usr/local/lib/libgdk-3.so
/usr/local/lib/libgdk-3.so was installed by package gtk3-3.22.30_4
```

Have you tried reinstalling _gtk3_ package? You can also try deleting it from package cache (`sudo rm /var/cache/pkg/gtk3-*`) if you need to force pkg to redownload it.


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## Emrion (Jan 6, 2019)

You were almost right. I found the solution here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/firefox-and-thunderbird-does-not-start.68332/

`# pkg install gtk3-3.22.30_4`

Which made gtk3 to upgrade as the initial version was gtk3-3.22.30_1.

Anyway, as ridiculous as I seem for you, I will stay away from wayland as long as possible concerning my others FreeBSD machines. They work well without. I don't like to waste a part of my weekend for such a thing of no sense and no importance.


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## olli@ (Jan 7, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Really, *BSD should go to X environment which is like BASE (without LINUX!).


No, the old X protocol is going to die, sooner or later (hopefully sooner). It is 35 years old and was designed at a time when people didn't think much about security issues. Wayland fixes that and a bunch of other problems.

And please stop abusing this thread for your “BSD vs Linux” mission. As already stated, Wayland is an OS-independent display protocol.


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## Spartrekus (Jan 7, 2019)

"X protocol is old and going to die ": it is your opinion. We all respect.


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## olli@ (Jan 7, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> "X protocol is old and going to die ": it is your opinion. We all respect.


Actually, it's not just my opinion.
Most of the X developers are working on Wayland, while X11 is only in “maintenance mode”, but not developed anymore. In an article a few years ago, one of the leading developers (Keith Packard) said that he views Wayland as “X13” (X12 already exists, but is meaningless). It's pretty clear that Wayland is the future.


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## felselva (Jan 7, 2019)

Been working on Wayland clients for a while, and as much I have my nitpicks with the API of Wayland, it's much better than X, in many many ways. X will really die, the question is when. End-users might decide to keep using X for longer, but Wayland is looking more attractive to devs.


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## Spartrekus (Jan 7, 2019)

felselva said:


> Been working on Wayland clients for a while, and as much I have my nitpicks with the API of Wayland, it's much better than X, in many many ways. X will really die, the question is when. End-users might decide to keep using X for longer, but Wayland is looking more attractive to devs.



Development is fine, but X should not die for great number of end users (aka. customer).

Let's positively smile!


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## olli@ (Jan 7, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Development is fine, but X should not die for great number of end users (aka. customer).


Well, end users will happily switch to something that is better.

For the very same reason, most users have switched from telnet to ssh.


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## Spartrekus (Jan 7, 2019)

I am not so sure that we can apply comparison between telnet/ssh and X/Wayland.

Wayland brings things, but take also other advantages of X.
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8

What about raspberry pi?  



> We’re still working to improve performance and memory consumption, and don’t expect to be able to replace X11 as our default desktop environment until later in the year, but we will be including a technology preview in our next Raspbian release. Until then, this post on Collabora’s website gives some more background.


Ref. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/wayland-preview/

More interestingly, one of the GNOME founders, who founded the license war between the Linux desktops KDE and GNOME with this project, works since then at Microsoft. At Wayland we can imagine something similar. In the end it will certainly not benefit the Unix or Linux users.


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## jpierri (Jan 7, 2019)

olli@ said:


> For the very same reason, most users have switched from telnet to ssh.


And some still use telnet today, on environments where the added security features of ssh would not make any difference.


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## Spartrekus (Jan 7, 2019)

jpierri said:


> And some still use telnet today, on environments where the added security features of ssh would not make any difference.



Telnet is still being used today, largely less than SSH, but still exists.


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## olli@ (Jan 8, 2019)

jpierri said:


> And some still use telnet today, on environments where the added security features of ssh would not make any difference.


Well, FreeBSD's telnet also has security features (it supports Kerberos authentication and encryption). On the other hand, ssh provides _many_ more features. For example, automated authentication, port forwarding, tunneling, connection sharing, working through proxies and so on. I haven't used telnet in this century. Even the typical use of telnet to check ports and debug protocols (e.g. telnet to port 25 for SMTP) works better with tools like netcat instead of telnet.


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## Spartrekus (Jan 9, 2019)

It took about 10 years of experience for X to start to work. More or less, but at least it works on all kind of platforms. At early begin of X, it was really long to get it work (Settings/config, drivers,...). I remember this time. Once X starts to work, sufficiently to display or just a bit, the opensource community will replace X with something else. A new system again and we all know what it means.


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## olli@ (Jan 9, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> It took about 10 years of experience for X to start to work.


Please excuse me, but that's nonsense. In 1990, I started using X11 on various UNIX platforms (Sun, DEC, IBM), and it worked perfectly well. At that time, X was already 6 years old.

By the way: Wayland is 10 years old.

Today, X is 35 years old, and some of the old cruft is starting to become a pain, especially for developers,  but also for users who try to have a secure environment. Security is much more a concern today than it was 35 years ago – X wasn't designed with security in mind.


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## Spartrekus (Jan 9, 2019)

Old should not be a concern. 

I had fun with *XFree86 *and second slackware once, I remember.
X11 is also about 10 years. Depends which X. 
vi or vim is very old. You don't use that probably, right?


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## rvgeerligs (Jan 10, 2021)

olli@ said:


> No, the old X protocol is going to die, sooner or later (hopefully sooner). It is 35 years old and was designed at a time when people didn't think much about security issues. Wayland fixes that and a bunch of other problems.
> 
> And please stop abusing this thread for your “BSD vs Linux” mission. As already stated, Wayland is an OS-independent display protocol.


nicely said, but it does not work on the latest


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## free-and-bsd (Feb 8, 2021)

I hope, at least, that my favourite FVWM will somehow be ported. I've found a 2014 dated article about porting Motif to Wayland, but no traces of it dated by any later date... Anyway.


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## kpedersen (Feb 8, 2021)

free-and-bsd said:


> I hope, at least, that my favourite FVWM will somehow be ported. I've found a 2014 dated article about porting Motif to Wayland, but no traces of it dated by any later date... Anyway.


I am fairly surprised to not see a libX11 "wrapper library" around Wayland.
But then since Wayland does not have a united approach (it is really just a scatty band of separate non-standard compositor projects), it doesn't have a single underlying library. The closest is maybe wlroots but again, that is fairly non-standard.

Once Wayland gets serious and matures (or dies) and a library such as this appears, I am fairly sure we will see Motif, Gtk2 come fairly quick. Fvwm will also be great to see but since they have to develop an entire compositor (a window manager + 1/4 of Xorg), it might be a complex project.

Either way, most of the FOSS world is in limbo over waiting for Wayland. Innovation has completely stagnated whilst less than 7% actually use Wayland (Gnome/Sway) vs Xorg.


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## free-and-bsd (Feb 9, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> I am fairly surprised to not see a libX11 "wrapper library" around Wayland.
> But then since Wayland does not have a united approach (it is really just a scatty band of separate non-standard compositor projects), it doesn't have a single underlying library. The closest is maybe wlroots but again, that is fairly non-standard.
> 
> Once Wayland gets serious and matures (or dies) and a library such as this appears, I am fairly sure we will see Motif, Gtk2 come fairly quick. Fvwm will also be great to see but since they have to develop an entire compositor (a window manager + 1/4 of Xorg), it might be a complex project.
> ...


I'm sure there WAS (and probably still IS) such "layer". I used Ubuntu recently, up to 16.04, and it had this Wayland compatibility layer allowing to run X11-linked apps. But I must check with my Ubuntu installation that was upgraded recently.


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## olli@ (Feb 9, 2021)

free-and-bsd said:


> I'm sure there WAS (and probably still IS) such "layer". I used Ubuntu recently, up to 16.04, and it had this Wayland compatibility layer allowing to run X11-linked apps. But I must check with my Ubuntu installation that was upgraded recently.


There is “XWayland” which acts as an X11 server that uses a Wayland compositor as its display backend. It allows traditional X11 clients to be displayed on a Wayland compositor. You can think of it as some kind of an X11-to-Wayland proxy.


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## kpedersen (Feb 9, 2021)

Yep, XWayland is kind of like XCocoa or Xming in that you can connect UIs using X11 to it. If you think about it, this functionality is very unique.

However I do believe a translation library would be a nicer approach. The Wayland guys don't seem to like booting up XWayland and this gets round it. I am also fairly sure the Wayland developers can't wait to disable the XWayland module in the majority of compositors and declare (quite falsely) that X11 is dead. Leaving their users with crappy setups for years to come.


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## 6502 (Feb 10, 2021)

on abandoning the X server
					

There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feed...




					ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com


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## free-and-bsd (Feb 10, 2021)

So then, Xwayland is the way to go for X11 apps? It depends on libepoxy, which is in the ports. Will see if XWayland builds, then.


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## kpedersen (Feb 10, 2021)

free-and-bsd said:


> So then, Xwayland is the way to go for X11 apps?


In the same way that Xming is the way to go for X11 apps. If you have the choice, you should use the superior native technology. That is Xorg on FreeBSD.

That is, unless of course you plan to run Wayland apps? Which ones are you interested in particular? I don't believe there are any.


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## free-and-bsd (Feb 10, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> In the same way that Xming is the way to go for X11 apps. If you have the choice, you should use the superior native technology. That is Xorg on FreeBSD.
> 
> That is, unless of course you plan to run Wayland apps? Which ones are you interested in particular? I don't believe there are any.


 No no, I'm talking about the hypothetical future where Xorg has been dropped and things not ported to Wayland.


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## 6502 (Feb 10, 2021)

I still don't know what is Wayland in details and have one main question: Is it possible to run remote GUI applications with Wayland in the same way like Xorg? I.e. app running on server and open windows on X client with network transfer of GUI commands like "draw line" or "fill area". Not like TeamViewer or other tools for Windows where a whole screen/window is transmitted as bitmap.


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## kpedersen (Feb 10, 2021)

6502 said:


> I still don't know what is Wayland in details and have one main question: Is it possible to run remote GUI applications with Wayland in the same way like Xorg? I.e. app running on server and open windows on X client with network transfer of GUI commands like "draw line" or "fill area". Not like TeamViewer or other tools for Windows where a whole screen/window is transmitted as bitmap.


The short answer is no. Wayland is limited in scope and individual compositors are very rough anyway.

The longer answer is that GUI toolkits are so crap and inefficient these days that a network transparent GUI system is less useful than it could be anyway. I.e compared to Microsoft's RDP (hybrid approach) where the developers had a little more sense and restraint.

Basically nothing today will really beat X11 using a light toolkit like Xaw or Motif. In my experiments, even though X11 is relatively chatty, it still uses vastly less bandwidth than the raster solutions. The future was yesterday 

I think NoMachine's NX improves upon X11 so is slightly faster but there are clearly portability issues because very few repos seem to contain the open-source server.


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## 6502 (Feb 10, 2021)

This means (for me at least) that X11 still have future. It will be good if Wayland and X11/Xorg can be integrated and be able to work together on the same system without side effects. Or maybe a new X12+ can be developed.


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## Snurg (Feb 10, 2021)

Beastie said:


> Check out --disable-xwayland.


Step by step collecting all knobs and switches one needs to know. Thanks 



laurentis said:


> In the 'latest' repository, the wayland option has been enabled by default since November. It will be the default in the upcoming quarterly update. It's only a 1Mb package, so not a big deal.


It is basically libinput what trickles in first, causing a lot of people having frustration with input devices fun.
So I think it should not be frowned upon, but instead be accepted if some old grunts like me don't want this kind of "fun".



olli@ said:


> By the way, even if you unset the WAYLAND option when building ports, you will still get libinput because it is the default input driver for X.org on FreeBSD >= 12. Only on FreeBSD <= 11 the old legacy drivers are used (xf86-input-keyboard and xf86-input-mouse).


This also needs to be investigated.
Are the original drivers still available (maybe as ports?) or does one need to "insert them back" in some unofficial way?

My aim is to find out all steps necessary to build FreeBSD without wayland, e.g. without libinput.
Then I will integrate these steps into my postinstaller, to have all this automated.
Final aim is to include installation of a local poudriere server that serves as kind of "pkg proxy server" which filters out wayland stuff and certain other things that creep in slowly.
Doing such manually would be an immense, repetitive effort for each desktop installation.
So I am working on the postinstaller basis, and hope to make it so good that it attracts people and becomes a community project.
If this is well-maintained, it might provide an easy way to stay wayland-free by updating the postinstaller every time one more drop of wayland seeps in.


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## olli@ (Feb 10, 2021)

6502 said:


> I still don't know what is Wayland in details and have one main question: Is it possible to run remote GUI applications with Wayland in the same way like Xorg? I.e. app running on server and open windows on X client with network transfer of GUI commands like "draw line" or "fill area". Not like TeamViewer or other tools for Windows where a whole screen/window is transmitted as bitmap.


Actually, most of today’s X11 applications don’t use X11 protocol commands like “draw line” or “fill area” anymore. For example, when a web browser renders a `<HR>` tag (for a horizontal rule on a web page), it draws that line itself and transfers the page as an image to the server.


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## 6502 (Feb 10, 2021)

I guess this is specific for web browser. It cannot predict how complex is a web page and prefer to render it locally and send it as image.


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## olli@ (Feb 10, 2021)

6502 said:


> I guess this is specific for web browser. It cannot predict how complex is a web page and prefer to render it locally and send it as image.


It’s not specific for web browsers. Almost all X11 applications that I use do it exactly like that (various browsers, GIMP, InkScape, Scribus, mplayer, and others). The “old” X11 protocol commands are mostly not used anymore today; basically they only still exist so the X server passes the conformance test suite.

See this paper (2002) by James Gosling, for example. Very interesting read. Quote: “It’s been interesting to watch the evolution in the way applications use X11. It has become standard to sidestep the server’s rendering and use the direct screen access extensions and libraries like libart.”

Or, as Kristian Høgsberg puts it: “[An X server has] a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. ... This includes the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives.”


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## kpedersen (Feb 10, 2021)

The ideal solution would be X12 and a new GUI toolkit from scratch to take full advantage of it. But I suppose we now need to wait for Wayland to faff about and waste our time for a while first now before we can actually do something useful.

I am beginning to suspect that it is actually lack of corporate interest as to why we don't have a decent remote desktop solution. Whilst that surprises me in the "day of the cloud", I guess the concept of DaaS (Desktop as a Service) is not really that popular. Perhaps things will change and then UNIX can catch up to Windows in this regard.


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## free-and-bsd (Feb 10, 2021)

Well then. After all this reading, it seems to me this new, amazing & cool Wayland does little more than being amazing (after 10 years of development). And it's going to be more amazing since many devs are actively working on it. But what's in there for us desktop apps users, I wonder?

Xorg, on the other hand, works well with the apps and does its job for us users. I have a funny feeling that Wayland may (or may not?) end up no better than the great and amazing next-level stuff BTRFS. When it became a reality and gave a measure of satisfaction that YES, such swiss-army-knife of a filesystem CAN be designed, it also became clear (or so it would seem) that it wasn't worth further effort... Or maybe Wayland will find its niche somewhere (with Gnome 3), but X will keep its positions.

I don't know, really, as a FVWM user (well, I do ). The next thing I want to try is Trinity DE. I remember KDE 3.5 was amazing and cool. Then came KDE4, then I stopped using KDE. And anyway, even if Xorg is as bad as they put it, I never ever had any problems with it.


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## Jose (Feb 12, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> I am beginning to suspect that it is actually lack of corporate interest as to why we don't have a decent remote desktop solution. Whilst that surprises me in the "day of the cloud", I guess the concept of DaaS (Desktop as a Service) is not really that popular.


Desktop? It's darn hard to get a command line in the cloud crapware.

First you have to find out what virtual machine is hosting your container. Then you ssh to that host and grep through the output of `docker ps` to find your instance. Then you `docker exec -it /bin/bash` hoping and praying that bash is installed in it. Then you hope that it's actually logging something useful or that there are enough standard tools installed in it to have a fighting chance of figuring out what it's doing, or, more often why it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing.


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## baaz (Jul 7, 2022)

olli@ said:


> No, the old X protocol is going to die, sooner or later (hopefully sooner). It is 35 years old and was designed at a time when people didn't think much about security issues. Wayland fixes that and a bunch of other problems.
> 
> And please stop abusing this thread for your “BSD vs Linux” mission. As already stated, Wayland is an OS-independent display protocol.


Unix is 50 years old ....


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## 6502 (Jul 7, 2022)

olli@ said:


> No, the old X protocol is going to die, sooner or later (hopefully sooner). It is 35 years old and was designed at a time when people didn't think much about security issues.


Maybe it is possible to run X in separate jail for every user and make it secure?


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## kpedersen (Jul 7, 2022)

6502 said:


> Maybe it is possible to run X in separate jail for every user and make it secure?



Since Xorg hasn't listened on TCP for close to a decade, it is secure in terms of the network.
Since Xorg has used a UNIX socket with individual user permissions (and Xauthority) for a decade it is secure in terms of local machine.
The only "insecure" thing about it is the fact that individual X11 applications can see each other and communicate; i.e the Window Manager program can see/manage individual windows belonging to other programs (by design, I will add). However since people do more on their machines than web browsers and playing games, this is functionality that is necessary and I am not convinced that ad-hoc Wayland / dbus hacks are more secure alternatives.

Unfortunately the separate jail idea (is good for many things BTW) won't solve this specific issue because... well it isn't an issue but required functionality! There is no solution to it because we *want* interoperability between GUI programs.

You could spawn a program and then delete the .X11 socket so no other programs can access the session. Very secure. That program can then manage everything itself, including rendering other programs and... well you basically have a Wayland Compositor


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## Jose (Jul 7, 2022)

Have there actually been any X11-based attacks, like ever? I've been using X for going on three decades now, and have never heard of one.


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## kpedersen (Jul 7, 2022)

Jose said:


> Have there actually been any X11-based attacks, like ever? I've been using X for going on three decades now, and have never heard of one.


The only one that people commonly come up with is keyloggers but frankly it is easier to listen on the raw /dev/input/* that Linux/Wayland conveniently chowns to the locally logged in user account (i.e that same account running the compromised program / keylogger!).

Accessing the raw keyboard is trivial on most platforms in fact and doesn't require root access in most cases; i.e: https://gitlab.com/osen/openbsd_drmfb_gnuboy/-/blob/main/src/sys/Keyboard.c

It is happening at a lower level so Wayland cannot prevent this either.


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