What is a Portal?

Today I talk about xdg-portals: what they are and why they're so important to the future of Linux.
👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇

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==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
1:32 What is an XDG-Portal?
6:48 Why They Are Needed
7:15 Are They Good?
11:19 Wrapping Up

#wayland #linux #thelinuxcast

[mckendrick]

It's worth noting, Wayland doesn't have anything to do with filesystem sandboxing – this is the job of flatpak. Wayland is sandboxing for your display, while flatpak is sandboxing for your filesystem. The filepicker portal was created for use in flatpaks. Flatpak and Wayland are two parts of improving the overall basic security model of Linux, and portals are the MAC solution for both.

[danielpicassomunoz]

Don't forget the all-important portal to be in sync with the system's light/dark theme

[lisovyy]

This is by far the most lightweight yet informative explanation of what a portal is, thank you sir.

[milohoffman]

ALSO on team "Just call them window managers already"

[mrag]

Thanks for explaining this kind of stuff, I’ve learn a lot from you in my linux journey, this was particularly helpful since I do lots of recording snd streaming, thank you so much Matt!

[danielagustinmorales]

1:48 WMs are not build on top of wayland, they implement wayland. I may be pedantic here, but I think this really shines a light to how wayland is designed

[Artichoked]

You are very talented in giving such clear and easy-to-understand explanations! Thanks for the informative video and keep up the good work.

[rjawiygvozd]

flatpak is also using portals for everything and when I was playing Baldur's Gate 3 in heroic launcher flatpak the portal that gives it file access had a memory leak which increased memory usage on every loading which eventually caused oom and froze the entire system. Probably got fixed already but who knows

[Winnetou]

Thanks Matt! Even though I had this vague idea that portals are just bridges between an app and some functionality (and which can govern who has access to what), having a more lenghty talk about it cements the understanding better.

I do have to confess, having an NVidia GTX 1060 mobile GPU, using the system for work (which includes sharing my screen in teams or google meet calls), I didn't even consider going Wayland yet, and seems I still won't for a while. I need things like screen... the whole screen, not just an app, sharing to work flawlessly, also screenshots to work flawlessly, preferably easy too. I kind of wish of switching to Wayland for the performance benefits it gets in games, but I game rather rarely and most of the stuff I play is not that demanding anyway.

So, I don't want to switch to Wayland and risk having things not work, or have crashes (which I had 0 in the 2 months I have on my Gentoo install, also my first bare-metal Linux). Sometimes, the system does start to slowdown / lag a lot and I found I have to restart, but so far it happened like 2 or 3 times. I did had other times when I got to about one week of uptime. Overall, my Windows 10 was more stable, but this is stable enough for now. As long as I don't have to restart more than once per day or have some ugly app/system crashes, I'm ok. The second reason, to be honest, for not trying Wayland, is that I'm also lazy to check it.

I kind of wish that the suckless folks got involved or developed something for Wayland. I know that dwl exists, but I think it's not done by them. With their minimalist + patch your desired functionality in (so you ONLY have what you want/need, nothing extra, which I like), I'm curious their take of Wayland in general.

[itssoaztek]

Have been using KDE Plasma 6 with Wayland for weeks. No issues at all with OBS and screen capture.

[JoshuaT]

I switched to linux when gnome and kde defaults to wayland. I tried x11 but I had issues with less smooth gameplay through on my 120hz display(mangohud shows same numbers on x11 but it felt like I was stuck on a 60 hz monitor even when it was set to 120). As someone who keeps having issues with x11 on games why are people so against wayland these days?

[RandomGeometryDashStuff]

04:32 file picker is not separate application (at least in gimp, nedit, tixati)

[zlice]

a good bit of portals are tagged as unstable or staging, so random crashes people have are probably just bugs.

what i find kind of funny about portals is, they came about from wayland's 'security model'. wayland's not network transparent, but dbus can run over a network :) it's not defaulted that way, but it'd be hilarious to see a poc where you sniff wayland data over a network

[iodreamify]

yep.. Protocols and Portals still confuse me. For example how do i check what features a new hypothetical compositor(like upcoming Cosmic) will provide? Do i need to look at the protocols they've implemented or the portal they've chosen? Or if i have a bug where should i submit it? Also what do the various levels of stable/unstable for protocols mean?

[softwarelivre]

I had an understanding that portals were an specification, and portal implementations can be buggy in specific implementations, but that this is due to the implementation and not the specification itself. Is that correct?

[RockawayCCW]

I just upgraded to Zorin OS 17 and it uses Wayland by default. So far, it's OK.

[raportmercado]

mullvad and tor browser don't allow to paste in my wayland, maybe the opensuse old kernel

[JamesSutherland-meuw]

Clock Stopper Watch Coming Soon at a store near you.

[slizgi]

Do you think, it will settle down for good within 2 years?

[Person-who-exists]

But Wayland still doesn’t have a cursor warp api