A challenger appears!
Too young, but interesting when we revisit this later.
TAIWINS is a Wayland compositor that acts as a tiling window manager and based on the Weston library (libweston). … TAIWINS as an alternative to Sway and other lightweight Wayland compositors
If it turns out that XFCE with Wayland would not be possible, would something like Xpra or Xephyr be a candidate? I have gotten Xephyr to work in regular Debian 10 with just a couple commands. Xpra works as well, but there were some compositing and graphics issues. With Xephyr, it was possible to resize the window and embed it seamlessly. The Tor Browser worked in that new display window and there were not any cpu issues (like using a large percentage at once).
At least this would stop the danger of one X app spying on other one. It might be interesting to use it in addition to some of the isolation / sandbox projects being developed right now, like the sandbox-app-launcher for example.
@Patrick
Yeah, unfortunately the clipboard does not function between the active Xephyr instance and the native desktop environment. That’s the one thing that kind of spoils it as a pretty good workaround.
For Xephyr, it was a matter of two commands:
Xephyr -resizeable -screen (whateverXwhatever) :714 (or whatever display you want to specify, it doesn’t matter)
and second command (in separate terminal window) was:
DISPLAY=:714 /path/to/app
Then it worked. The clipboard is annoying, I’ll admit. I’ll research it.
When you start the Tor Browser, since it uses a specific window size depending on the size of your monitor, thats why I left the -resizeable option. This way, the Xephyr window starts a little bigger, then when Tor starts in the Xephyr window, just resize the outer xephyr display window with Tor’s window if the black stripe is bothersome.
To be fair, I am not sure if the benefits are necessarily worth the hassle of potentially losing clipboard and fiddling with displays, although it could probably be scripted.
Xpra I have had some resolution issues and bugs like the application window not forming all the way, dpi is wrong in the launched xpra window and others. Others use xpra with no issues so it could be the specific recipe of my machine’s drivers/graphics/egl.
EDIT: Some browsing led me to this:
There are a couple suggestions; I do not have any experience with them.
What’s wrong with sway? I’ve used it for months. It’s good enough.
Sway is also going to get security labels which allow users to configure GUI privileges for each app and default GUI privileges.
Wayland support is mature in GNOME and GNOME Shell, but in-VM 3D acceleration is a hardrequirement. While I have confidence in the 3D implementation in KVM, I don’t for VBox and having an option that doesn’t require it is better for attack surface reduction.
It’s a trade-off of whether GNOME/Wayland + 3D accel attack surface is < Xfce + X11 without 3D accel. I don;t know if a Wayland supporting Xfce would inherit GNOME’s 3D reqs. An alternative that uses Wayland without needing a graphics API is the best of all worlds.