Bug 103894

Summary: Synaptic Package Manager and other apps that want to display as root will not run on wayland by default
Product: Wayland Reporter: mback
Component: waylandAssignee: Wayland bug list <wayland-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: critical    
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64)   
OS: Linux (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description mback 2017-11-24 18:32:27 UTC 
Problem: Common and easily fixable issues are not documented on the Wayland website -- and that can cause Newbs to give up prematurely on Wayland.

What I would like to see as a fix: Please create a place on your website that talks about common problems with Wayland and solutions to those problems.

Further discussion:

The fix/workaround for the Synaptic problem is easy and available:

xhost +si:localuser:root
(place in Startup Application Preferences -- on Gnome)

The issue is that we users (meaning everyone that needs Synaptic on Linux -- meaning... _everyone_) have to hunt all over the Internet to find it.  It is really bad in terms of experience for those that use Wayland for the first time:

https://youtu.be/Z0N8OAkiK-g

Please create a place on your website that talks about common problems with Wayland and solutions to those problems.
Comment 1 Pekka Paalanen 2017-11-27 13:30:57 UTC 
Yeah, that's the solution for X11 apps running as root. On one hand, I understand the user desire, on the other hand running an X11 app as root raises a big red flag and an alarm siren. It is something people just should not do.

Doesn't Synaptic have any separation between the UI process and the privileged operations? Do you actually run it as root on an Xorg-based desktop as well?

I would imagine that usually you run the GUI app as a normal user, and then it uses either a privileged system service or a setuid-root helper tool to do the privileged bits.

So, I'm torn. It would be good to document the right way to let a program running as root to connect to Xwayland, but OTOH it should not be encouraged. It is definitely not something a newbie should be doing at all.
Comment 2 Daniel Stone 2018-06-04 08:48:35 UTC 
Yes, we'd want to encourage Synaptic to fix their architecture. If you look at, e.g. GNOME Software, that uses PackageKit as a privileged backend and runs the UI unprivileged. I'm pretty sure the same is true of the KDE equivalent.

As Pekka says, this is quite a dangerous thing to be doing.

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