> When Linux goes off and decides it'll rewrite its working desktop stack and it's still, ten years later, not useable?
In fairness it wasn't just the rewrite that was the problem, but it looks for all the world like there was a large faction in the Linux UI world around Wayland that believes accessibility is insecure and designed the new systems to make it impossible. It has been an interesting if unfortunate situation that seems to be slowly being fixed.
> but it looks for all the world like there was a large faction in the Linux UI world around Wayland that believes accessibility is insecure and designed the new systems to make it impossible
Agreed.
FWIW, accessibility is insecure, that is a fact, and it's also fine. The problem is that many security-minded people forget to ask the critical question: security for whom, and from what. There is no such thing as "security" in general. There is always a subject being secured from a threat.
With Wayland, like with most modern software development, the user ends up being the thing to secure from, and what is being protected are the interests of the vendor.
9front tells me otherwise. It's security model with namespaces and rfork it's far more tuned to modern times than the GNU/Linux or BSD one where even wth mitigations and the like a good crafted NES sound file (6502 code in the end, as C64 MOD files) could cause mayhem on some buffer overflow executing x86 code.
rio(1) windows under plan9/9front have their own namespace and OFC you can restrict these per windows making these kind of attacks futile.
How's the a11y story under Plan 9? I always thought of Plan 9 as being very forward thinking for its time but unfortunately stuck in the past in various ways, but are there screen readers and voice input and everything?
> [T]he security model on Unix (and Linux) is to trust your applications
If that were true, httpd (and all other system daemons) would be run as root and neither the 'nobody' user and group nor the various security-related X11 extensions would exist.
Anyone who has worked in this field for more than a few years (regardless of their era of entry) knows that nontrivial programs are faulty and can happen to or be induced to do things that are harmful in varying degrees to the operation of the computer that runs them.
In fairness it wasn't just the rewrite that was the problem, but it looks for all the world like there was a large faction in the Linux UI world around Wayland that believes accessibility is insecure and designed the new systems to make it impossible. It has been an interesting if unfortunate situation that seems to be slowly being fixed.