[Sprocklem]

> My uneducated guess at why Wayland failed to succeed is that it went for extreme modularity and refused to say (back in like 2009) "Here's the security mechanism everyone has to use to take screenshots, etc. If this breaks your spacebar heater, sucks to be you."

I tend to agree. I have long attributed the mess that is wayland-protocols in large part to the fact that they didn’t define a security mechanism or permission model in place from the start.

They seemed to assume, at first, that it was reasonable to prevent all programs from doing what any program could abuse. Had they instead acknowledged that some programs need to be granted the ability to take actions that otherwise risk insecurity, they wouldn’t have needed to try to distort the protocols to fit the lacking security model of Wayland (or, in some cases, wouldn’t have needed to circumvent Wayland entirely to achieve their ends).

[gary_0]

I generously assume they simply considered a mechanism to grant permissions to be out of scope of the original spec, a merely horrific error and disastrous design flaw. If they were instead completely ignorant to the existence of screen recording, password managers, screen readers, and so on... inconceivable idiocy. Either way, as long as something like Wayland can happen, Windows has nothing to fear from Linux.