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Thanks for your efforts! In my view there's absolutely space for Xorg in the future. Not every OS can run Wayland well and Wayland lacks some X features like n

by _abox 5y ago

Thanks for your efforts! In my view there's absolutely space for Xorg in the future. Not every OS can run Wayland well and Wayland lacks some X features like network transparency. I kinda hope it'll be backed by an organisation that's really keen on taking it forward. Augmenting the security model for example. And going back to some client rendering enabling features like anti-aliasing. I really think there's a lack of a viable remote display tool in Linux, where Windows has RDP. Block pushers are just too slow. VDI usecases are picking up again heavily, as do other security based techniques which could benefit, like remote browser isolation. Filling up my desktop with Windows running on a bunch of other computers is just so powerful. So in other words I'd love to see an X12 that really moves towards the future. As I understand it, it's currently with RedHat which only sees future in Wayland and X is just on life support. I regret that because I see a lot of concepts in it that are still very valid and that have been lost in current alternatives.

markstos 5y ago
Which OSes can't run Wayland well?
- ch_123 5y ago
  The last I checked, the BSDs and most other Unix-likes (and genuine Unix™ variants) don't support Wayland. In fact, Wayland is pretty much Linux-only in practice.
  - amarshall 5y ago
    Wayland is viable on FreeBSD, at least. It is very much not “Linux-only”.
    - ch_123 5y ago
      From the FreeBSD wiki: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland > While Wayland isn't ready for general use. I can't readily find anything to indicate that this claim is out of date. I am aware that Wayland has been ported, but I have not heard of it being widely used, or being "production ready" as per se.
      - amarshall 5y ago
        FreeBSD wiki is a bit notorious for being out-of-date, and that particular page is marked “CategoryStale”. Anyway, first result on DuckDuckGo is someone using Wayland on FreeBSD successfully [1]. [1]: https://euroquis.nl/freebsd/2021/03/16/wayland.html https://euroquis.nl/freebsd/2021/03/16/wayland.html
    - jolmg 5y ago
      Isn't that because FreeBSD provides an emulation of Linux?
      - kevans91 5y ago
        No, wayland bits generally run well enough without needing the linuxolator.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> I really think there's a lack of a viable remote display tool in Linux, where Windows has RDP. Block pushers are just too slow. VDI usecases are picking up again heavily, as do other security based techniques which could benefit, like remote browser isolation. Filling up my desktop with Windows running on a bunch of other computers is just so powerful. I think it's just a tooling problem; Apache Guacamole or Xpra can trivially stick windows in a browser window, VNC is... okay, not amazing, but passable, and even RDP can be made to work well on Linux, it's just that setting up any of those is a horrible pain on Linux (in my experience at least).
Klasiaster 5y ago
For Wayland there is waypipe for single-window forwarding over SSH, and there is wayvnc for wlroots-based compositors (Phosh, sway) which can run in headless mode with llvmpipe rendering, and weston has an RDP backend (but I recommend wlroots with wayvnc over weston).
diegocg 5y ago
X is a dead end. If you want an evolution of X with network transparency, Arcan seem to be the most likely alternative https://arcan-fe.com/2020/10/28/a12-advancing-network-transparency-on-the-desktop/ https://arcan-fe.com/2020/10/28/a12-advancing-network-transp...
- emidln 5y ago
  I successfully use X11 and its network and OS transparency daily. Macbooks don't have 2TB of RAM or schedule 256 threads at the same time.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Arcan looks pretty amazing actually. I'll have a closer look at that over the coming days, thanks!
rbanffy 5y ago
> Wayland lacks some X features like network transparency. This, IMHO, is the most tragic loss in functionality desktop systems suffered. It’s hard to justify being unable to do something we’ve done since the mid 90’s. The fact I could sit in front of a computer while running GUI software from different machines with different OSs as if they were local and that, now, the best I can hope for is what VNC gave me in the early 2000’s is nothing short of depressing.
- guenthert 5y ago
  I can relate as I'm one of the few people I personally know who has used that feature in the last twenty years. In the last ten years or so however, I used some variation of NX in any case, whenever I needed a remote X application, as then I typically need to preserve the session as well. I think the last time I used plain X11 protocol across the network was when I still had Sun Rays (between the Sun Ray server and the application's host).
- bitwize 5y ago
  Waypipe has entered the chat.
  - tpoacher 5y ago
    *waypipe kicked by admin (reason: "lol") Ah ... the good old days of IRC :)
- billfruit 5y ago
  Wayland is not the only thing thats lead to this. Modern Qt apps work so badly over network transparency as to be totally unusable.
  - musicale 5y ago
    Yet another reason to dislike Qt.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Most toolkits now use client-side text rendering which makes using X strictly worse than VNC for remoting.
sprash 5y ago
> And going back to some client rendering enabling features like anti-aliasing. The xrender extension already supports server side drawing, anti-aliasing, transparency, gradients and so on. If you use for example Cairo with the xrender backend almost everything except the tessellation of splines will be rendered server side and has a rather efficient wire protocol which will be better than even RDP.
- md8z 5y ago
  The problem with XRender (and Cairo) is that it is still inherently an old-school immediate mode API. It's never going to be as performant as a fully parallelized GPU implementation.
  - sprash 5y ago
    All XRender operations are already GPU accelerated via Glamor. The spline tesselation step of drawing is notoriously hard to do on GPUs. Hence the separation at that point was actually a smart choice.
    - md8z 5y ago
      The GPU acceleration in Glamor doesn't really help, the issue here is that everything still needs to be serialized by the X protocol, rather than being drawn in parallel as they would on a GPU. Edit: There has been some progress on GPU tessellation of splines, here is the most recent I can think of that was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512897
      - sprash 5y ago
        > The GPU acceleration in Glamor doesn't really help According to benchmarks at the time 700-800% speedup. > everything still needs to be serialized by the X protocol Drawing in general needs to be serialized. As soon as the object tree gets too big parallelized rendering on GPU will be slower because of the huge amount of branches. The link you posted solves this problem somewhat but introduces a huge amount of complexity to the renderer (also the benchmarks are done on Windows which obviously has no xrender backend). Xrender on the other hand is a simple standardized solution that works today.
pabs3 5y ago
> Wayland lacks some X features like network transparency. There is waypipe for that: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html

by _abox 5y ago

markstos 5y ago

Which OSes can't run Wayland well?

ch_123 5y ago
The last I checked, the BSDs and most other Unix-likes (and genuine Unix™ variants) don't support Wayland. In fact, Wayland is pretty much Linux-only in practice.
- amarshall 5y ago
  Wayland is viable on FreeBSD, at least. It is very much not “Linux-only”.
  - ch_123 5y ago
    From the FreeBSD wiki: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland > While Wayland isn't ready for general use. I can't readily find anything to indicate that this claim is out of date. I am aware that Wayland has been ported, but I have not heard of it being widely used, or being "production ready" as per se.
    - amarshall 5y ago
      FreeBSD wiki is a bit notorious for being out-of-date, and that particular page is marked “CategoryStale”. Anyway, first result on DuckDuckGo is someone using Wayland on FreeBSD successfully [1]. [1]: https://euroquis.nl/freebsd/2021/03/16/wayland.html https://euroquis.nl/freebsd/2021/03/16/wayland.html
  - jolmg 5y ago
    Isn't that because FreeBSD provides an emulation of Linux?
    - kevans91 5y ago
      No, wayland bits generally run well enough without needing the linuxolator.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> I really think there's a lack of a viable remote display tool in Linux, where Windows has RDP. Block pushers are just too slow. VDI usecases are picking up again heavily, as do other security based techniques which could benefit, like remote browser isolation. Filling up my desktop with Windows running on a bunch of other computers is just so powerful. I think it's just a tooling problem; Apache Guacamole or Xpra can trivially stick windows in a browser window, VNC is... okay, not amazing, but passable, and even RDP can be made to work well on Linux, it's just that setting up any of those is a horrible pain on Linux (in my experience at least).

Klasiaster 5y ago

For Wayland there is waypipe for single-window forwarding over SSH, and there is wayvnc for wlroots-based compositors (Phosh, sway) which can run in headless mode with llvmpipe rendering, and weston has an RDP backend (but I recommend wlroots with wayvnc over weston).

diegocg 5y ago

X is a dead end. If you want an evolution of X with network transparency, Arcan seem to be the most likely alternative https://arcan-fe.com/2020/10/28/a12-advancing-network-transparency-on-the-desktop/ https://arcan-fe.com/2020/10/28/a12-advancing-network-transp...

emidln 5y ago
I successfully use X11 and its network and OS transparency daily. Macbooks don't have 2TB of RAM or schedule 256 threads at the same time.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Arcan looks pretty amazing actually. I'll have a closer look at that over the coming days, thanks!

rbanffy 5y ago

> Wayland lacks some X features like network transparency. This, IMHO, is the most tragic loss in functionality desktop systems suffered. It’s hard to justify being unable to do something we’ve done since the mid 90’s. The fact I could sit in front of a computer while running GUI software from different machines with different OSs as if they were local and that, now, the best I can hope for is what VNC gave me in the early 2000’s is nothing short of depressing.

guenthert 5y ago
I can relate as I'm one of the few people I personally know who has used that feature in the last twenty years. In the last ten years or so however, I used some variation of NX in any case, whenever I needed a remote X application, as then I typically need to preserve the session as well. I think the last time I used plain X11 protocol across the network was when I still had Sun Rays (between the Sun Ray server and the application's host).
bitwize 5y ago
Waypipe has entered the chat.
- tpoacher 5y ago
  *waypipe kicked by admin (reason: "lol") Ah ... the good old days of IRC :)
billfruit 5y ago
Wayland is not the only thing thats lead to this. Modern Qt apps work so badly over network transparency as to be totally unusable.
- musicale 5y ago
  Yet another reason to dislike Qt.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Most toolkits now use client-side text rendering which makes using X strictly worse than VNC for remoting.

sprash 5y ago

> And going back to some client rendering enabling features like anti-aliasing. The xrender extension already supports server side drawing, anti-aliasing, transparency, gradients and so on. If you use for example Cairo with the xrender backend almost everything except the tessellation of splines will be rendered server side and has a rather efficient wire protocol which will be better than even RDP.

md8z 5y ago
The problem with XRender (and Cairo) is that it is still inherently an old-school immediate mode API. It's never going to be as performant as a fully parallelized GPU implementation.
- sprash 5y ago
  All XRender operations are already GPU accelerated via Glamor. The spline tesselation step of drawing is notoriously hard to do on GPUs. Hence the separation at that point was actually a smart choice.
  - md8z 5y ago
    The GPU acceleration in Glamor doesn't really help, the issue here is that everything still needs to be serialized by the X protocol, rather than being drawn in parallel as they would on a GPU. Edit: There has been some progress on GPU tessellation of splines, here is the most recent I can think of that was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512897
    - sprash 5y ago
      > The GPU acceleration in Glamor doesn't really help According to benchmarks at the time 700-800% speedup. > everything still needs to be serialized by the X protocol Drawing in general needs to be serialized. As soon as the object tree gets too big parallelized rendering on GPU will be slower because of the huge amount of branches. The link you posted solves this problem somewhat but introduces a huge amount of complexity to the renderer (also the benchmarks are done on Windows which obviously has no xrender backend). Xrender on the other hand is a simple standardized solution that works today.

pabs3 5y ago

> Wayland lacks some X features like network transparency. There is waypipe for that: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html