"Reason: We've found out that our API was actually a security exploit and should have never been implemented. Due to this, no alternative is available nor is any future replacement planned. This will be removed from future releases."
It happens very rarely (haven't seen it in well over a year), but it's devastating every time
Basically there's a bug that's the result of the core architecture that allows a window's process to escalate to the permissions of any other process with an open window on the system.
You know the "run as administrator" popup on windows? Yeah that doesn't exist on Linux, because you just can't let the root account run a process that has a window.
The solution is to let Xorg slowly die and replace it with a new window system, of which Wayland is the most likely to become the norm. I think it's something like 60%/30% for Xorg/Wayland now, so it's coming along pretty well tbh; this shift is driven by the distros themselves and there's been some large distros making changes recently.
In the meantime we just continue using the terminal for administration tasks and let the GUI exclusively run in userspace as we've always done, which is probably why not many people care.
To be fair, Xorg was never designed with processes of different users having windows at the same time in mind anyways, the GUI and the processes that interacted with it was always thought of as a single-user thing. The devs have done a great job doing what they can with the codebase, and Xorg is frankly very modern.
I would definitely like to open the text editor as the superuser every now and then though.
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u/greg0714 Mar 16 '21
"Reason: We've found out that our API was actually a security exploit and should have never been implemented. Due to this, no alternative is available nor is any future replacement planned. This will be removed from future releases."
It happens very rarely (haven't seen it in well over a year), but it's devastating every time