Lol. Lmao even. I needed to do this because I wanted to learn the miryoku keyboard layout , and I wanted a way to quickly switch between Miryoku and standard QWERTY. The best way to do this that I could come up with was to bind a special key on my keyboard to toggle kmonad on and off. So I wrote a service for kmonad and gave my user permission to manage it. Running kmonad as my user wouldn’t work, because kmonad needs root to create a virtual input device.
Luckily, I am running Void, so the solution was a single well-documented command. Out of curiosity I decided to take a look at what this would look like on systemd distros, leading to this meme. Honestly, I had to do a double take by the time the guy started talking about Javascript.
I feel kind of useless typing this out because you’re just gonna ignore it anyway. In my post, I am talking about needing to do X. Your response is “why are you doing X, you should do Y”. Why am I not surprised that you’re a systemd user? Do you also use Gnome by any chance?
Hey. There is no reason to feel useless. Everyone has value. And the best part about Linux is that we all can make our own choices. If people hate systemd they don’t have to use it. That’s ok. Void linux I think is actually a pretty cool distro. It reminds me of the BSDs for some reason.
I use systemd because I like how it works and I think it’s well designed. As for desktops I am a huge fan of sway. Gnome isn’t bad on a laptop or tablet though. What do you use?
I’m on bspwm right now, but I’ve been thinking of switching to wayland (in particular, hyprland). I’ve got nothing against gnome BTW. I have a friend with one of those laptops that turns into a tablet by flipping the keyboard to the back, and he also says Gnome is the only DE that “just works” for touchscreen, even though he uses KDE on his main laptop and desktop.
How are things on wayland by the way? From what I understand, it has partial support for running X11 apps, right? Do you use any X11 apps, or were you able to find wayland-native counterparts for everything?
[void] reminds me of the BSDs for some reason
I’ve heard this comparison a lot, though I don’t know what it means, since I’ve never used BSD haha. Maybe I should give BSD a try sometime.
And the best part about Linux is that we all can make our own choices
How are things on wayland by the way? From what I understand, it has partial support for running X11 apps, right? Do you use any X11 apps, or were you able to find wayland-native counterparts for everything?
Most of the time, you wouldn’t even notice if an app is using xwayland or native wayland… except for apps written with electron/chromium embedded framework (chromium, steam client, spotify, vscode, etc). They’re pretty glitchy on xwayland so you’ll have to figure out if they accept arguments to use wayland natively, but not all of them support wayland natively yet.
Your response is “why are you doing X, you should do Y”
Because they’re right, you shouldn’t do X. I know that’s not a satisfying answer for most people to hear, but it’s often one people need to hear.
If the process must run as root, then giving a user direct and unauthenticated control over it is a security vulnerability. You’ve created a quick workaround for your issue, and to be clear it is unlikely to realistically cause you problems individually, but on a larger scale that becomes a massive issue. A better solution is required rather than recommend everybody create a hole in their security like yours in order to do this thing.
If this is something that unprivileged users reasonably want to control, then this control should be possible unprivileged, or at least with limited privilege, not by simply granting permanent total control of a root service.
This is ultimately an upstream issue more than anything else.
Wait, aren’t most desktop environment support switching keyboard layout these days? For example, gnome can do that with super+space or via the language switcher in the top bar. Using a user service to do this seems overkill.
Miryoku isn’t a regular layout. It has things like keys that change what they do depending on whether you tap them or hold them. Maybe it’s theoretically possible to implement it as a standard XKB layout, but it would not be fun. Usually, Miryoku is implemented in your keyboard firmware. But if your keyboard doesn’t support flashing custom firmware (e.g. builtin laptop keyboard), then you have to use a software solution like kmonad, which is a daemon that has to run as root.
As a sidenote, even for some “standard” keyboard layouts there needs to be background process. For example, Chinese and Japanese have too many characters to fit on a keybaord, so they use something called an Input Method Editor. But those usually don’t need root, in contrast to kmonad.
Lol. Lmao even. I needed to do this because I wanted to learn the miryoku keyboard layout , and I wanted a way to quickly switch between Miryoku and standard QWERTY. The best way to do this that I could come up with was to bind a special key on my keyboard to toggle kmonad on and off. So I wrote a service for kmonad and gave my user permission to manage it. Running kmonad as my user wouldn’t work, because kmonad needs root to create a virtual input device.
Luckily, I am running Void, so the solution was a single well-documented command. Out of curiosity I decided to take a look at what this would look like on systemd distros, leading to this meme. Honestly, I had to do a double take by the time the guy started talking about Javascript.
I feel kind of useless typing this out because you’re just gonna ignore it anyway. In my post, I am talking about needing to do X. Your response is “why are you doing X, you should do Y”. Why am I not surprised that you’re a systemd user? Do you also use Gnome by any chance?
Hey. There is no reason to feel useless. Everyone has value. And the best part about Linux is that we all can make our own choices. If people hate systemd they don’t have to use it. That’s ok. Void linux I think is actually a pretty cool distro. It reminds me of the BSDs for some reason.
I use systemd because I like how it works and I think it’s well designed. As for desktops I am a huge fan of sway. Gnome isn’t bad on a laptop or tablet though. What do you use?
I’m on bspwm right now, but I’ve been thinking of switching to wayland (in particular, hyprland). I’ve got nothing against gnome BTW. I have a friend with one of those laptops that turns into a tablet by flipping the keyboard to the back, and he also says Gnome is the only DE that “just works” for touchscreen, even though he uses KDE on his main laptop and desktop.
How are things on wayland by the way? From what I understand, it has partial support for running X11 apps, right? Do you use any X11 apps, or were you able to find wayland-native counterparts for everything?
I’ve heard this comparison a lot, though I don’t know what it means, since I’ve never used BSD haha. Maybe I should give BSD a try sometime.
Amen to that!
Most of the time, you wouldn’t even notice if an app is using xwayland or native wayland… except for apps written with electron/chromium embedded framework (chromium, steam client, spotify, vscode, etc). They’re pretty glitchy on xwayland so you’ll have to figure out if they accept arguments to use wayland natively, but not all of them support wayland natively yet.
That’s good to hear. I try to avoid electron apps (I just use the website version instead), but thanks for the tip anyway!
Because they’re right, you shouldn’t do X. I know that’s not a satisfying answer for most people to hear, but it’s often one people need to hear.
If the process must run as root, then giving a user direct and unauthenticated control over it is a security vulnerability. You’ve created a quick workaround for your issue, and to be clear it is unlikely to realistically cause you problems individually, but on a larger scale that becomes a massive issue. A better solution is required rather than recommend everybody create a hole in their security like yours in order to do this thing.
If this is something that unprivileged users reasonably want to control, then this control should be possible unprivileged, or at least with limited privilege, not by simply granting permanent total control of a root service.
This is ultimately an upstream issue more than anything else.
Wait, aren’t most desktop environment support switching keyboard layout these days? For example, gnome can do that with super+space or via the language switcher in the top bar. Using a user service to do this seems overkill.
Miryoku isn’t a regular layout. It has things like keys that change what they do depending on whether you tap them or hold them. Maybe it’s theoretically possible to implement it as a standard XKB layout, but it would not be fun. Usually, Miryoku is implemented in your keyboard firmware. But if your keyboard doesn’t support flashing custom firmware (e.g. builtin laptop keyboard), then you have to use a software solution like kmonad, which is a daemon that has to run as root.
As a sidenote, even for some “standard” keyboard layouts there needs to be background process. For example, Chinese and Japanese have too many characters to fit on a keybaord, so they use something called an Input Method Editor. But those usually don’t need root, in contrast to kmonad.