port to Wayland

Patrick · October 24, 2023, 5:04pm

There have a few Wayland specific forum threads but none generally about a port to Wayland.

Make sure Whonix tools support Wayland was done.

Currently there is no clear way forward Wayland support… Except, waiting for Xfce to become Wayland compatible.

It’s probably not a port to GNOME. Reasons: Dev/GNOME - Whonix
(If you feel you must advocate for GNOME, please start a dedicated forum discussion.)

KDE? Well, a many releases ago Whonix was based on KDE but then there was a KDE upgrade which made KDE very slow inside VMs. Hence it was dropped. Reference here: User Poll - XFCE vs KDE - KDE Deprecation Considered!

What other choices are there towards Wayland support?

roddhjav · October 24, 2023, 7:00pm

Hi, my 50 cents.

Security aside, both Gnome and KDE may be too resource hungry for small VM like Whonix. Therefore, it makes me think, did you see that Raspberry OS has just moved to Wayland with LXDE.

“What’s replaced LXDE?”
LXDE is an assembly of various components, the main ones being the openbox window manager, the lxpanel panel and the pcmanfm file manager and desktop. Openbox has been replaced with wayfire; lxpanel has been replaced with wf-panel-pi, and pcmanfm is still used, but modified to work with a Wayland backend.
Bookworm — the new version of Raspberry Pi OS - Raspberry Pi

Patrick · October 25, 2023, 5:52pm

For LXDE consideration I just made a detailed reply here:

Patrick · November 6, 2023, 3:06am

Patrick · January 9, 2024, 4:47am

github.com/Kicksecure/security-misc

Wayland Default DE for Real Security

opened 11:14AM - 18 Nov 23 UTC

monsieuremre

As the title says. I think whonix maintainers in the forum have discarded the id…ea of moving back to kde too quickly. Moreover, I find most all of the arguments to be for the most part unfounded. KDE being bloated or heavy for Whonix is just not true. KDE used to be 'heavier' when both Qubes and Whonix were using it. It is now much more optimized. Xorg is unironically massively more bloated than wayland. All the 'bloat' is not part of the DE. We do not have to install everything. Just install the shell and we are done. And I want to make this clear, I propose we only install the shell. Not even the terminal, not the file manager, nothing from the debian repositories but the shell, and let me explain why. But before that, I want to recap once again why xfce severly slows whonix down. * Xfce is now officially the only 'major' DE that does not have a plan to switch to wayland for good. They say they would try stuff, but that's it. It is not even certain that they will switch at all. Even Cinnamon has given a date now. Budgie, Mate, they are all switching, they have plans, they have dates. Stuff like Lxqt are already almost completely switched. Xfce is an outlier here. And this is expected. They for some reason agreed not to use wlroots or libmutter. That means they kinda have to develop their own compositor, which we all know is not possible with the little funding Xfce has. If they do not decide to suddenly base on wlroots, Xfce will never have wayland. * Xfce is lags behind, massively. On everything. The desktop looks really, really, but I mean really outdated. Normally this is not as important but you have to keep in mind, compelling to the average user is something you probably want. * It is really a shame whonix still unironically ships with xorg as default. * The only reason this is still just passable is whonix designed to be run on a VM. But Kicksecure is planned to be a regular distro. That means, xorg gotta go, really. True and real. * Xfce is small. You tell on the Whonix website that you base on Debian, and one of the reasons for that is that there is a good chance in 10 years Debian is still going to be around. Do you know what not might be around in 10 years? Xfce. And by 'might', I mean they won't definetely be around, if they don't catch the pace in switching to wayland. So at the very least, before I make the argument for KDE, we should all more or less agree on this: Xfce bad. At least for security. Now my argument for KDE. * KDE e.V. is a well-established and well-funded non-profit organization based in Germany. They are not some random project. * KDE is customizable. It is fast. It is optimized. It can be as simple and minimalistic, if not more minimalistic, than xfce on demand. * KDE has a well functioning wayland compositor. Which is to be the default. * KDE provides almost all of their software as flatpaks. I know this might not mean much to you. But this is the reason why I suggested we install the shell from the debian repository and literally stop there. For everything else KDE, let's use the flatpak. Cut out the middle man. Get our software directly from KDE developers as they intend. Much faster bug and security fixes. It is also possible to vastly increase the flatpak sandboxing provided by bubblewrap with some overrides. The file manager, the terminal, the literally everything, as a flatpak. This is the only case I would support flatpaks. Because we get the software directly from the developers, and we get bubblewrap default. Can be further hardened too. Want a secure system? It won't get more secure than getting your software directly from the developer with all the security fixes, in a sandboxed environment. (This clause is optional of course) Switching to flatpak defaults would normally be a seperate suggestion of mine, but yeah consider that extra. Getting the latest KeePassXC officially from the developers or getting the latest Thunderbird officially and directly from Mozilla is a huge leap in security. Of course I trust the debian team to do the packaging well and port security issues. But they can't be as good at porting security fixing than directly having them fixed from the developers. Can't be as fast. Anyway this is a seperate topic, for now disregard. Only consider what relates KDE.

Patrick · January 10, 2024, 10:23am

A post was split to a new topic: LXQt - Wayland support

Patrick · January 10, 2024, 10:24am

Patrick · January 10, 2024, 10:24am

Patrick · January 11, 2024, 8:26am