• 0 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle










  • Because having each piece of software do it itself would be not only chaos but a massive security concern.

    Not really, the main point is that (most) apps don’t know where they are on the screen, whether they’re minimized, on the active workspace, … and they don’t care either. That’s the responsibility of the window manager.

    The app tells the display server “I need a window to display these pixels” and that’s it. And the window manager, well, manages these windows.

    On the topic of security, X11 doesn’t handle security at all, that’s one of the main issues. So any graphical app can read the other windows’ pixels, grab everything you type, everything you copy, … OTOH Wayland isolates apps so they can’t do that by default. Apps that really need to (screenshot apps, …) can use “portals” to ask for these permissions.