And going to rabbit hole there are even proof of concept security implementation named Xnamespace for Xorg fork (needs polishing and much more patches but looks doable. see wip documentation: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/X11Libre/xserver/d2b60a3d6... )
The way X11 developers ended up fixing this is by creating Wayland. This way privileged operations (like keylogging, screen capture, etc) require the cooperation and authentication through the display server.
That sort of solution is cancer if you want to do anything the display server authors didn't think of. I've got a script that I invoke with a global hotkey that determines the window title of the currently focused window and fuzzy matches it against pipewire audio stream names so I can mute the focused window with a single keypress. If I want that to work in Wayland I'm pretty much up shit creek because somebody with their head in the clouds thinks that my needs are super dangerous or something.
Wayland devs for the longest time thought implementing what was needed for accessibility (mainly, global keyboard hooks for Orca to work) was a security problem. Nevermind the fact that nobody hacks X servers, or your wayland compositor, because if I wanted to hook your keyboard with a keylogger, I'd hook it through evdev. And then you wouldn't even know let alone be able to do much about it if I did it properly.
Wayland doesn't say "this is impossible", it says "this is out of scope of the core display protocol, implement this somewhere else".
Which, well, we do. Practically all the X usecases are covered on Wayland systems now. Screen sharing, screen clipping, global hotkeys, file pickers, getting the window title like you said... I can do all of that on KDE, right now, under Wayland.
If you change to another DE that has less capabilities than KDE, of course you can't do it. Emacs and LibreOffice Writer will have vastly different capabilities and people can choose what they want based on the capabilities they desire.
And that is exactly the problem. Now things like accessibility (or, really, any feature that the maintainers of the core protocol didn't think were "necessary" because they like minimalism) have to be implemented by each and every compositor. If the compositor doesn't implement it, your screwed unless either you convince them to add it or you add it yourself. Talk about causing huge amounts of fragmentation for absolutely no reason.
The proper thing Wayland should've done is waited until Wayland had reached feature parity with X, then released it to the world and started acting like it's the future.
That's the issue. Because wayland punts on so much functionality that used to be available with standard interfaces in X11, it fragments the ecosystem to such a degree that all these useful little utilities just don't really have a means to grow.
> Practically all the X usecases are covered on Wayland systems now. ... global hotkeys ...
Are you sure? I looked at that earlier this year for a personal tool I wanted to create and found no way to do it on Wayland (On X, I did it just fine).
I had a long back and forth about this very thing with both Claude and ChatGPT, and neither conversation was fruitful: every option had some dependency (like switching to KDE, or similar).
I know some blind people who tolerate it but yeah, I find it completely unusable at the moment. I haven't tried Gnome recently but last time I tried it I had apps like Bitwarden malfunctioning in some very, very weird ways that just... Never happened on Xorg. If I remember right, it was things like forms not being read properly or something, can't remember off the top of my head now. But it certainly didn't leave me with a good impression; it made me think this Wayland thing was just half-baked. Also, Orca modifiers were passed-through directly to the compositor and Orca wasn't allowed to intercept them either, which made just using my computer feel awkward since I'd always need to remember to turn off caps lock every time I wanted to do something even remotely complicated. I've heard that Gnome has solved this but as I said above, I think this may be a Gnome (and at most KDE) thing, and not something that everybody has decided to just do.
For some weird reason I can't access it, it just redirects me to this image about hacker news. Did he just configure his webserver to just universally display that image? Even if I manually enter the address into my address bar it does that so I assume that that's what he did...
Good. Disallowing software to position its own windows has been a major usability improvement over the X11 days of software making stupid positioning decisions and having to patch it out everywhere...
Yeah, assuming all users and all software should work the same idea is a great way to get people moving to a new platform.
Maybe, just maybe, some people know what they want, and if they want applications that can put themselves in specific corners, why shouldn't the desktop let the applications do that, if the user is OK with it?
Fixing X11's security would of broken window positioning as well. Since that is a security issue.
The deal here is that the only way to fix X11's security issues is by breaking all those types of workflows and forcing application rewrites to implement them in authenticated ways.
So if you are going have to go and break all that stuff, why not fix a crapload of other problems while you are at it?
Calling Wayland "X13" may have avoided a lot of misunderstandings, but it probably would of caused others.
Maybe it's both? There are applications with good reason that need to chose their location themselves, and users who want that type of behavior, so it's definitively not just a security issue.