XWayland Initial Window Positioning Merged For Wayland's Weston

[phoronix]

Phoronix: XWayland Initial Window Positioning Merged For Wayland's Weston

Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has merged his patch-set into Weston for supporting initially positioned windows with XWayland, a feature that some X11 apps rely upon for correct functionality...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XWayland-Init-Window-Position

[uid313]

This is great!
Then apps will open in the same position they were when you last closed them. It makes your workspace predictable and consistent.
This is important for Wayland to be enjoyable to use.

[bregma]

It's great because then the X11 application that looks just like your password prompt can now be accurately placed over the real password prompt and no one will know how you got pwned. Seamelss integration of one of the most egregious aspects of X11, baked right in to the reference compositor of the Wayland project to act as an example.

Fortunately, Weston isn't something that gets used in production environments for anything so changes to it aren't of general relevance to anyone outside of academic interest.

[froyo]

I am totally impressed by the overall quality of Wayland (including XWayland....). I am sure they will iron out remaining issues soon. Kudos!

[indepe]

It's great because then the X11 application that looks just like your password prompt can now be accurately placed over the real password prompt and no one will know how you got pwned. Seamelss integration of one of the most egregious aspects of X11, baked right in to the reference compositor of the Wayland project to act as an example.

Fortunately, Weston isn't something that gets used in production environments for anything so changes to it aren't of general relevance to anyone outside of academic interest.

I'd be surprised if the Wayland default is an unpredictable random position. And isn't that something an application can still do if it wants to, for password prompt windows? Or something a toolkit could provide? For most other application windows, using a saved position is a definite user experience advantage.

[Serafean]

This is great!
Then apps will open in the same position they were when you last closed them. It makes your workspace predictable and consistent.
This is important for Wayland to be enjoyable to use.

IMO this is not a job for the application. This is the compositor's job.
Also this extension only applies to XWayland.
In my experience, an application that forces a specific position generates a mess on the desktop.

[amehaye]

It's great because then the X11 application that looks just like your password prompt can now be accurately placed over the real password prompt and no one will know how you got pwned. Seamelss integration of one of the most egregious aspects of X11, baked right in to the reference compositor of the Wayland project to act as an example.

Fortunately, Weston isn't something that gets used in production environments for anything so changes to it aren't of general relevance to anyone outside of academic interest.

I guess that when the user password is required for administrative purposes, the compositor can give a visual cue that normal apps can't. For example in Gnome Shell maybe they could change the global title bar to reflect 'password mode'.

[amp3030]

I guess that when the user password is required for administrative purposes, the compositor can give a visual cue that normal apps can't. For example in Gnome Shell maybe they could change the global title bar to reflect 'password mode'.

But bregma is raising a valid concern. I have the same fear every time I enter my Firefox/Thunderbird master password, and these are not root passwords so your 'password mode' idea is not trivially applicable.

I'd be interested to know what others think about this problem.

[emblemparade]

Guys, this applies only to Weston, not to Wayland in general. Every compositor needs to implement this on their own. So, if you're using GNOME, Mutter should be handling this.

Weston is important as a reference compositor for Wayland: a place to test out Wayland features and ideas. These days, Weston is mostly run inside a window to test things. Also, Weston might be a useful compositor for tiny implementations in the embedded industry.

[starshipeleven]

It's great because then the X11 application that looks just like your password prompt can now be accurately placed over the real password prompt and no one will know how you got pwned. Seamelss integration of one of the most egregious aspects of X11, baked right in to the reference compositor of the Wayland project to act as an example.

Fortunately, Weston isn't something that gets used in production environments for anything so changes to it aren't of general relevance to anyone outside of academic interest.

Great trollpost.

-Making these tricks is completely pointless in X11 as in X11 any GUI application can sniff all input anyway (= easymode keylogger).
-password prompts are placed in the same spot (usually center of screen)
-avoiding fake password prompts is a compositor thing (it must reserve for itself some graphical functions or something like that so that any application calling them to emulate it will fail), Wayland per-se can't do much for this.

Bonus points for mentioning a true issue in a completely unrelated newsthread, in a way that may actually fool people into thinking it is related.