This is a truly WTF moment about messed up responses to X11 session removal in Gnome.
2 weeks ago I published a blogpost about the upcoming plans of GNOME 49 and the eventual removal of the X11 session. Since then, instead of looking at feedback, bugs and issues related to the topic, we all collectively had to deal with the following, and I am not exaggerating one bit:
- Fascists and Nazis
- Wild Conspiracy Theories that make Qanon jealous
- “Concerned” Trolling about the Accessibility of the Wayland session
- A culture war where Wayland is Gay, and X11 is the glorious past they stole from you
In my wildest dreams I could have never made this shit up. You all need mandatory supervised access to the Internet from now on.
What’s autokey?
It’s roughly equivalent to AutoHotKey on Windows. It’s an application that can intercept key combos or even typed strings and…do basically anything. Let’s say you type a certain phrase a lot, you could come up with an abbreviation so that when you type an abbreviation it deletes the abbreviation and inserts the big thing you type. Or maybe you want it to fire when you press ALT+ y. Or, maybe you want it to do something programmatic, like insert the date and time. Or do anything you can get Python to do.
This apparently does not work on Wayland systems, something about the way it accessed keystrokes in X11 isn’t open in Wayland for security concerns.
I don’t know autokey, so I can’t speak to whether they replace all its functionality but there are ‘xdotool-like’ programs for Wayland. So it is at least very possible to replace functionality like the latter you mentioned (press button/button combination -> do an action, like inserting date/start a program/do something programmatic). Some examples I know are:
ydotool is a perfect replacement for dmenu based password managers.
Honestly that sounds like a security nightmare and its probably a good thing that doesn’t work anymore.
Honestly if pressing some buttons to get the computer to do something you programmed it to do is a “security nightmare” I think we should probably just give up, tear down the electric grid and go back to dying of smallpox at 17 like nature intended.
That’s not problematic part. The reading all my inputs is.
There’s software on the computer that does that anyway, otherwise the keyboard won’t work. Feels like an arbitrary line to draw.
Keyboards send commands through drivers. There is no 3rd party software reading it out.
Autokey is software written by someone.
Drivers are software written by someone.
Have you vetted every line of code running on your computer?
Not sure if you understand threat models.