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> In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen

by cat199 6y ago

> In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen sharing, screenshots, and to a lesser extent remote desktop/applications. They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!" as though that was supposed to make it ok. People have thus harbored some inherent resentment ever since. agree 1000% - really don't care about X per se, but remote windowing is an awesome and unique feature, and disrespecting it by treating it like some obscure/uneeded thing and qustioning why people are mad about it conveys alot about the attitude that i don't want to get behind

cturner 6y ago
Remote windowing is a legacy of the era when universities ran dozens of dumb terminals from a server. It would be bizarre to pursue that in an era of hardware-accelerated graphics. If the Wayland design was weighed down by such things, it could never hope to be progress.
- andrewprock 6y ago
  This ignores the current tend of hosted gaming services. The pendulum regularly swings back and forth between thin and fat clients as cost and innovation evolve.
  - Jarolis 6y ago
    Quite true. I've have to switch my desktop back to Windows because the only remote gaming server worth using (Parsec) doesn't work on Linux.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    There is no reason for a display protocol to know about these things. At most it is responsible for giving access to a window’s/screen’s buffer and then any app can do whatever they want with it, eg compress it and stream it (which as I wrote in an other topic is usually better performing than today’s frameworks over whatever remained of X remoting, with bitmap transfers and the like)
- NoodleIncident 6y ago
  Universities still do that. It's not that bizarre of a use case
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- Jarolis 6y ago
  How many people use TeamViewer, Anydesk, etc? I don't see how remote windowing is legacy. The feature would be a huge hit if it were modernized and made more accessible and efficient (akin to Microsoft's RDP), and that's only possible if it's a core part of the protocol.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    TeamViewer/AnyDesk/VNC is not "remote windowing", it's "remote access" to a whole desktop. And that's easily available for the wlroots ecosystem https://github.com/any1/wayvnc https://github.com/any1/wayvnc But actually "remote windowing/apps" is even better supported, it's a universal proxy: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe Absolutely does not require any support from the core protocol.
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- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  It is actually a common enough use case that Windows supports it now via Remote App, which is bit of a hack over RDP since RDP wasn't really designed for that. The use case may be relatively small but it undeniably still exists.
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  - cturner 6y ago
    It is reasonable to want remote desktop access. I am unfamiliar with the RDP technique you raise, but expect it could be achieved through VNC or similar systems. X-Windows is itself a weak response to remote access. I have memories of trying to use Oracle Forms over a modem connection to uni, and finding it far inferior to VNC connections to work systems - effectively unusable. The remote-windowing mechanisms of X-Windows are coupled to aspects of X-Windows that Wayland was created to overcome. The video 'The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone' discusses this. Microsoft Windows does not do remote-windowing in the X-Windows sense. RDP is not Explorer. From what I read, a RDP-like-thing could be built, and Wayland would not get in the way of this. I think the Wayland team make a clear case for why this is out-of-scope for them.
    - cat199 6y ago
      this is sort of exactly my point but inverse - X windows is awesome on a lan & due to the 'native' support for individual applications, but there is definately huge room for improvement w/r/t display protocol performance / latency issues which are largely a result of relying on X server drawing architecture don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, in other words
      - kaba0 6y ago
        But this is the thing, X is not network transparent anymore. Basically no app created in the last decade use the native rendering libs of x, and thus what happens over the network (moving bitmaps) is much worse than what a decent video streaming algorithm could do.
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by cat199 6y ago

cturner 6y ago

Remote windowing is a legacy of the era when universities ran dozens of dumb terminals from a server. It would be bizarre to pursue that in an era of hardware-accelerated graphics. If the Wayland design was weighed down by such things, it could never hope to be progress.

andrewprock 6y ago
This ignores the current tend of hosted gaming services. The pendulum regularly swings back and forth between thin and fat clients as cost and innovation evolve.
- Jarolis 6y ago
  Quite true. I've have to switch my desktop back to Windows because the only remote gaming server worth using (Parsec) doesn't work on Linux.
- kaba0 6y ago
  There is no reason for a display protocol to know about these things. At most it is responsible for giving access to a window’s/screen’s buffer and then any app can do whatever they want with it, eg compress it and stream it (which as I wrote in an other topic is usually better performing than today’s frameworks over whatever remained of X remoting, with bitmap transfers and the like)
NoodleIncident 6y ago
Universities still do that. It's not that bizarre of a use case
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Jarolis 6y ago
How many people use TeamViewer, Anydesk, etc? I don't see how remote windowing is legacy. The feature would be a huge hit if it were modernized and made more accessible and efficient (akin to Microsoft's RDP), and that's only possible if it's a core part of the protocol.
- floatboth 6y ago
  TeamViewer/AnyDesk/VNC is not "remote windowing", it's "remote access" to a whole desktop. And that's easily available for the wlroots ecosystem https://github.com/any1/wayvnc https://github.com/any1/wayvnc But actually "remote windowing/apps" is even better supported, it's a universal proxy: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe Absolutely does not require any support from the core protocol.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
It is actually a common enough use case that Windows supports it now via Remote App, which is bit of a hack over RDP since RDP wasn't really designed for that. The use case may be relatively small but it undeniably still exists.
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- cturner 6y ago
  It is reasonable to want remote desktop access. I am unfamiliar with the RDP technique you raise, but expect it could be achieved through VNC or similar systems. X-Windows is itself a weak response to remote access. I have memories of trying to use Oracle Forms over a modem connection to uni, and finding it far inferior to VNC connections to work systems - effectively unusable. The remote-windowing mechanisms of X-Windows are coupled to aspects of X-Windows that Wayland was created to overcome. The video 'The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone' discusses this. Microsoft Windows does not do remote-windowing in the X-Windows sense. RDP is not Explorer. From what I read, a RDP-like-thing could be built, and Wayland would not get in the way of this. I think the Wayland team make a clear case for why this is out-of-scope for them.
  - cat199 6y ago
    this is sort of exactly my point but inverse - X windows is awesome on a lan & due to the 'native' support for individual applications, but there is definately huge room for improvement w/r/t display protocol performance / latency issues which are largely a result of relying on X server drawing architecture don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, in other words
    - kaba0 6y ago
      But this is the thing, X is not network transparent anymore. Basically no app created in the last decade use the native rendering libs of x, and thus what happens over the network (moving bitmaps) is much worse than what a decent video streaming algorithm could do.
deleted 6y ago
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