4 ms·

"X isn't network transparent anymore" according to Daniel Stone (longtime X.org and Wayland developer): https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44?t=18m31s https://youtu.be/R

"X isn't network transparent anymore" according to Daniel Stone (longtime X.org and Wayland developer): https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44?t=18m31s https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44?t=18m31s If you use X11 forwarding with any application that uses a modern toolkit (Gtk+ 3, Qt 5, maybe also Gtk+ 2 and Qt 4) you are just pushing uncompressed pixmaps over the wire, as a bad substitute for VNC/RDP/etc. Xpra adds image compression on top, AFAIK, so it should be slightly better. The entire video (https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44 https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44) provides a good overview as to why people that have been working on X11 for many many years decided to start Wayland.

bitwize 10y ago
Whose fault is that? The toolkit's? Or the protocol's? Expecting Wayland to sop up the slop because by definition it communicates at RAM-bandwidth speeds does not remove the fact that you have slop, and eventually it will bite you. Most GUIs are relatively static. They are not Crysis. Even if you hate X's drawing primitives and believe absolutely in the power of client-side rendering, there are huge wins to be had simply by pre-rendering stuff and storing it server-side as pixmaps, then using XCopyArea calls to show them on the screen. Sheesh, I was doing that since I was 18 years old, and I figured it out using just the man pages. It's not hard. It's not even particularly burdensome. It's just a case of "herp, derp, we don't want to think about our rendering code" from the toolkit crowd. Do we have to burn the entire display stack to conform to toolkits written the stupid way around?
- kefka 10y ago
  Well, I'd be all for a rewrite. But doing so, we're throwing all existing Xwindows code down a drain. I'm not liking that, at all. I also want network transparency. Right now, I can run a Windows program remotely, via X and WINE. I can't do that on Windows proper without a whole lot of setup on a Windows Server (I've done it). Yeah, X may be slow. It may have crappy security model. But in the end, it's better than what MS has and better than what Mac has. I could imagine something different. Go back to core principles, and write a server using current design paradigm and knowledge of hardware. Get the server side running, and well. Write an emulation layer that will allow existing X apps to use it. And then start porting from X to.. say, Ywindows. :) (Then again, I wished that DRM existed for Linux, so the graphical subsystem could have its own top, memory manager, process scheduler, and such. Then that would have set up Linux to be the dominant force in computation. Alas, it never happened that way.)
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure I remember some compatibility shim being part of the wayland & mir plans in order to support X11 apps.

bitwize 10y ago

Whose fault is that? The toolkit's? Or the protocol's? Expecting Wayland to sop up the slop because by definition it communicates at RAM-bandwidth speeds does not remove the fact that you have slop, and eventually it will bite you. Most GUIs are relatively static. They are not Crysis. Even if you hate X's drawing primitives and believe absolutely in the power of client-side rendering, there are huge wins to be had simply by pre-rendering stuff and storing it server-side as pixmaps, then using XCopyArea calls to show them on the screen. Sheesh, I was doing that since I was 18 years old, and I figured it out using just the man pages. It's not hard. It's not even particularly burdensome. It's just a case of "herp, derp, we don't want to think about our rendering code" from the toolkit crowd. Do we have to burn the entire display stack to conform to toolkits written the stupid way around?

kefka 10y ago
Well, I'd be all for a rewrite. But doing so, we're throwing all existing Xwindows code down a drain. I'm not liking that, at all. I also want network transparency. Right now, I can run a Windows program remotely, via X and WINE. I can't do that on Windows proper without a whole lot of setup on a Windows Server (I've done it). Yeah, X may be slow. It may have crappy security model. But in the end, it's better than what MS has and better than what Mac has. I could imagine something different. Go back to core principles, and write a server using current design paradigm and knowledge of hardware. Get the server side running, and well. Write an emulation layer that will allow existing X apps to use it. And then start porting from X to.. say, Ywindows. :) (Then again, I wished that DRM existed for Linux, so the graphical subsystem could have its own top, memory manager, process scheduler, and such. Then that would have set up Linux to be the dominant force in computation. Alas, it never happened that way.)
- tracker1 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure I remember some compatibility shim being part of the wayland & mir plans in order to support X11 apps.