6 ms·

> But a lot of it is like the version 11 protool (without all of the extensions they have added), It’s hard to tease out, but it sounds like you’re advocating

• ColanR 7y ago
  I've seen this sort of comment frequently: "it's 2019, why are we still doing n?", as if somehow it should be assumed we have grown out of it. It's a completely unsubstantiative argument; its effect is to sweep under the rug any justification for the 'old way' of doing things.
  • TylerE 7y ago
    No, it isn't unsubstantiative at all. For one very big thing, hardware accelerated rendering didn't exist in 1980. Also, no one really cares about network support anymore, because it's simpler and better to just do a screen share.
    • foobarbecue 7y ago
      I like how he made up the word "unsubstantiative" and you just rolled with it.
      • maemilius 7y ago
        If a word accurately conveys meaning to another person, does it matter that it's made up? If you hadn't mentioned it (and I hadn't looked it up as a result), I would have had no idea it wasn't a "real" word.
        • foobarbecue 7y ago
          Well, every word was, at some point, made up. Maybe we should herald the birth of this new word with great rejoicing.
      • juped 7y ago
        No one made up any words, they just misspelled "unsubstantive" (understandably!).
        • foobarbecue 7y ago
          Made up or misspelled, I just think it's interesting that the error was contagious.
    • Jedd 7y ago
      > Also, no one really cares about network support anymore, because it's simpler and better to just do a screen share. I care about network support for GUI applications. I don't think _whole screen_ shares are either simpler or better.
      • chousuke 7y ago
        waypipe works with single applications just fine. There are some rough edges but as far as I can tell it already works at least as well as remote X ever did.
        • jcelerier 7y ago
          Does it support using the client computer DPI like X11 does ? And running apps from a headless system ?
          • diffeomorphism 7y ago
            Seems like it https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html Give it a try and let us know.
    • pwg 7y ago
      > Also, no one really cares about network support anymore, because it's simpler and better to just do a screen share. Actually, some of us do make use of X11 network transparency on a regular basis. Running an X11 program on a remote CPU, but having its window appear on the screen of the machine I'm sitting in front of, is quite a useful feature. And one that I make use of quite regularly. And it is most definitely not the same as a 'screen share'.
      • ISL 7y ago
        Does Wayland break X-forwarding? That's a huge step backward, if so.
        • pwg 7y ago
          https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html > Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering? > No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to achieve. Note that the next two paragraphs do discuss how network transparency could be built, by clients, on top of Wayland. So it depends on how you define "does wayland break X-forwarding": If defined as Wayland, the new server, yes. Because network transparency is not built in to Wayland the new server. If defined as Wayland, the ecosystem, well, there appear to be ways to do it by adding it back in.
          • ISL 7y ago
            That's a bummer. ssh -X is a powerful utility.
            • diffeomorphism 7y ago
              https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe ssh -X still works and wayland native is waypipe ssh (though one could probably wrap that into ssh -X to make it seamless).
    • fao_ 7y ago
      > Also, no one really cares about network support anymore, because it's simpler and better to just do a screen share. [citation needed] Let me guess, you live in a city?
      • Dylan16807 7y ago
        Are you implying something about connection quality? Because in my experience X forwarding degrades very quickly when you lower connection quality, much faster than other options.
        • sprash 7y ago
          That depends on the toolkit. GTK first renders everything remotely and then transmits the final pixmap to the server. It also has multiple unecessary rountrips on every event which amplifies the lag even further. On the other hand xlib toolkits like xathena widgets run blazingly fast even over modem style connections because all the drwaing happens server side and only a limited amount of drawing commands are transmitted over the network.
          • zzo38computer 7y ago
            Yes, and I think Xaw is much better, but that is just one reason for such thing.
            • sprash 7y ago
              Xaw is not suitable for modern applications. Essential features like radio buttons or combo boxes are not present. Text input boxes support almost all Emacs command keys but none a typical desktop user would expect and they don't support Unicode. It's a mess.
      • jml7c5 7y ago
        No need to be rude.
        • 7y ago
    • nirvdrum 7y ago
      Does Wayland improve the remote desktop story at all? I sometimes drop to X11 forwarding because VNC and X2Go don't really work so well for me. If I think I'm going to need a remote desktop for a while, I'll reboot into Windows and load my Linux installation up as a raw disk VM in VMware Workstation and then rely on Windows's RDP for remote desktop. I'd love to simplify all this.
      • atq2119 7y ago
        If anything Wayland makes network transparency worse because there's nothing like ssh -X for it that works out of the box. Another commenter mentioned waypipe, which is a start, but it'll likely be years before it achieves the required ubiquity.
      • burpsnard 7y ago
        I had good ux with realvnc, maybe novnc, ..
        • nirvdrum 7y ago
          It's been a while, so maybe I'll give that shot again. My experience with VNC is that it's just laggy and really doesn't like it when I connect to a multi-display desktop with a single display laptop. Windows Remote Desktop adapts beautifully with virtually no lag, so I was hoping Wayland adopted something similar.
    • datenwolf 7y ago
      > For one very big thing, hardware accelerated rendering didn't exist in 1980. Then why the hell isn't it being used by GTK/Cairo nor Qt in production code. Oh yes, there are OpenGL(-ES) backends in both. But by far and large they're doing all their rendering on the CPU and then blit over to the graphics system. This is BTW the main reason for Wayland coming to be in the first place: The observation that the X server has been "reduced to a blitting engine" (if your world view is so narrow to cover only GTK and Qt). And then they're draining the baby with the bathwater… Wayland is how old now, 9 to 10 years, and it's still far from usable for production. IF you compare that with X11, after 10 years it didn't have just a barely working server and some example application. It was a thriving ecosystem with multiple desktop environments, toolkits, loads of production applications and you could just run them all arbitrarily in the same environment. Only last Friday I was working on a custom windowing library (something in the same vein as GLUT, SDL or GLFW, however with a focus on "desktop" programs with traditional GUIs instead of things like games) and whenever I start working with the Wayland side of things it turns into a severe headache. Wayland is an actively developer hostile (and I'd even wager to say user hostile, too) ecosystem. For example, because in Wayland there's no concept of windows, and whatever a window is, is left to the compositor, you can't even properly implement something like dockable windows. The best hack I could come up with was via the drag'n'drop mechanism that Wayland then does specify. IMHO Wayland is a prime example for the sunken cost fallacy hitting hard.
    • msla 7y ago
      So you're advocating a protocol which doesn't work on low-end systems and deliberately breaks workflows.
    • e40 7y ago
      Also, no one really cares about network support anymore, because it's simpler and better to just do a screen share. I've used that feature every single day for the last 20 years.
      • MayeulC 7y ago
        Yes, and it works way better with screen sharing for some content, which is most, nowadays. Take for instance a big 3D game. It is much more bandwidth-efficient to compress the frames and send that over than to send the 3D models, textures and transformation matrices over the net. We still don't have PCIE Gen. 4 bandwidth for networking. Okay, this is an extreme example. But most apps (just take Firefox as an example) send bitmaps over X forwarding anyways. I use Xpra for these, but waypipe should work a lot better, in theory (less round-trips, etc). Of course, it's better if the graphics toolkit is install at both ends and can render the stuff locally (which was the intent with X). AFAIK a few support that, I wonder if rdp doesn't specify something to negotiate its use on a per-client basis?
  • braindeath 7y ago
    Are you actually familiar with the drawing model of core X?? It is completely obsolete and does not support acceleration of virtually any 2D or 3D rendering construct we take for granted for the past 30 years. The GP was suggesting “without extensions”. Good luck with that.
    • zzo38computer 7y ago
      I am familiar, and I think that it is mostly good; the only thing missing is direct rendering (which would be optional). (And I did not mean entirely without extensions, just to remove most of the stuff.) (I also think modern fonts don't look nice; I want to use bitmap fonts on the screen!)
• zzo38computer 7y ago
  [This paragraph used to mention Vulkan, but now I think that is not a good idea and DRI is better. See the replies to this message for details.] Also, on server implementations that support SCM_RIGHTS (the core protocol would have some way to check), it would be possible to pass a file descriptor opened with shm_open() to the client and share memory that way, if the client and server are on the same computer. In this way, direct rendering is more efficient than it is with the X11 core protocol. I said a lot like the version 11 core protocol, not exactly like it; in what I am thinking there would still be many differences, although many things are similar (because I think much of it is good).
  • Jasper_ 7y ago
    Vulkan really shouldn't be a protocol. What you really want is DRI3/Present extensions, which are fine. But then you still have issues with window resizing and reconfiguration, and the difficulties with COMPOSITE... basically you're asking for Wayland by the end.
    • zzo38computer 7y ago
      Like I said, I don't know much about it. You are probably correct; it shouldn't be with Vulkan. But I think there are some problems with Wayland, and many things in the X protocol is good (although there are also problems with it). OK, I looked, and I think you are right; DRI is better. It would work with what my ideas are (and I think SCM_RIGHTS would be used for this purpose too). Handling resize though would just be you can continue to render a picture of the old size and it will be cropped (or if made larger, the X window background will be displayed in the part outside of the DRI picture), or else it may handle the resize event to close the DRI handle and open a new one with the new size if needed. The protocol would still be independent of the implementation, though. But because DRI involves system-dependent features, this means that the use of DRI is not fully defined in the core protocol. However, that shouldn't be a problem.
      • Jasper_ 7y ago
        SCM_RIGHTS is already used for FD passing for DRI3. Your thoughts on shm_open are already part of the X SHM extension, which has been around for over 25 years now. Lots of people have ideas for an "X12" that turns out to be stuff already supported by the X11 protocol. Not enough people know about the true problems with X11, or have ever asked us Linux developers think about what needs fixing (hi, I'm a long-time Linux graphics contributor and co-wrote a large part of the Wayland spec). X11 extensions have not been a major problem in 25 years.