3 ms·

X's network transparency is not feasible when using any modern window manager, since you'll still be slinging pixel buffers over the network, and compositing th

X's network transparency is not feasible when using any modern window manager, since you'll still be slinging pixel buffers over the network, and compositing them together on the client. It's just easier to render on the host and just send a single pixel buffer instead of a bunch of them as this is faster and simpler.

eternityforest 5y ago
Sure, but the main thing is that if you do ssh -X it does kind of work. I can have one individual window integrated with my normal desktop, from a remote machine. It sucks but it's enough to get a few basic things done. Wayland should surely be able to at least match that! Individual pixel buffers should still be faster if only some of them change regularly, right?
- eptcyka 5y ago
  This never worked for me. But I agree, there's no reason this functionality couldn't be implemented as an extension protocol to Wayland.
  - funcDropShadow 5y ago
    This is hard to believe to me, I've used `ssh -X` countless times over the last twenty years on Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, Suse, Nixos and whatever else. I cannot remember this did ever fail. It might have been slow. I might have fixed xauth issues at the beginning. But it worked. So I am wondering what you did to have such bad experience.
    - eptcyka 5y ago
      Gnome, probably. But also, all the things I'd want to run like this probably wouldn't work - games, video players, browsers and IDE's. Everything else I run from the terminal be it locally or remotely.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- TingPing 5y ago
  waypipe performs better than x forwarding does.
rnhmjoj 5y ago
I'll never understand why everyone went this way instead of extending the X11 draw pimitives to something that can actually be used by modern UI toolkit, like svg. People always claim that pixel buffers are more efficient, even bandwidth-wise, but I've yet to see a proof that "here's a bunch of pixels" is more efficient that "draw a gray rectangle (x0,y0,x1,y1)".
- eternityforest 5y ago
  In a way they did. HTML/HTTP is exactly what you get if you extend it to cover all the modern stuff, and it's great. I think the real question is why can't the display manager just be a browser, plus some backwards compatibility for "here's a bunch of pixels".. All the RAM use issues of Electron go away if the whole desktop is a single shared browser, plus you can do client side JS work and not need to send any data at all for a lot of things, AND you can cache things, plus you can decompress video client side, play sound on the client... Just do HTTP over UNIX domain sockets with some signalling to tell the server to open a window.
- sprash 5y ago
  The X11 drawing primitives have already been extended with the Xrender extension. It allows to draw textured, anti aliased trapezoids, color gradients and many composition/transparency/mask modes. If GLAMOR is enabled it is even hardware accelerated. It is of course much more efficient over the wire than periodically dumping a bunch of bitmaps. The Cairo X11 backend uses Xrender by default. Also many GTK 2.x rendering backends used Xrender. All of this functionality was dropped with GTK 3+.
  - lamp987 5y ago

eternityforest 5y ago

Sure, but the main thing is that if you do ssh -X it does kind of work. I can have one individual window integrated with my normal desktop, from a remote machine. It sucks but it's enough to get a few basic things done. Wayland should surely be able to at least match that! Individual pixel buffers should still be faster if only some of them change regularly, right?

eptcyka 5y ago
This never worked for me. But I agree, there's no reason this functionality couldn't be implemented as an extension protocol to Wayland.
- funcDropShadow 5y ago
  This is hard to believe to me, I've used `ssh -X` countless times over the last twenty years on Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, Suse, Nixos and whatever else. I cannot remember this did ever fail. It might have been slow. I might have fixed xauth issues at the beginning. But it worked. So I am wondering what you did to have such bad experience.
  - eptcyka 5y ago
    Gnome, probably. But also, all the things I'd want to run like this probably wouldn't work - games, video players, browsers and IDE's. Everything else I run from the terminal be it locally or remotely.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
TingPing 5y ago
waypipe performs better than x forwarding does.

rnhmjoj 5y ago

I'll never understand why everyone went this way instead of extending the X11 draw pimitives to something that can actually be used by modern UI toolkit, like svg. People always claim that pixel buffers are more efficient, even bandwidth-wise, but I've yet to see a proof that "here's a bunch of pixels" is more efficient that "draw a gray rectangle (x0,y0,x1,y1)".

eternityforest 5y ago
In a way they did. HTML/HTTP is exactly what you get if you extend it to cover all the modern stuff, and it's great. I think the real question is why can't the display manager just be a browser, plus some backwards compatibility for "here's a bunch of pixels".. All the RAM use issues of Electron go away if the whole desktop is a single shared browser, plus you can do client side JS work and not need to send any data at all for a lot of things, AND you can cache things, plus you can decompress video client side, play sound on the client... Just do HTTP over UNIX domain sockets with some signalling to tell the server to open a window.
sprash 5y ago
The X11 drawing primitives have already been extended with the Xrender extension. It allows to draw textured, anti aliased trapezoids, color gradients and many composition/transparency/mask modes. If GLAMOR is enabled it is even hardware accelerated. It is of course much more efficient over the wire than periodically dumping a bunch of bitmaps. The Cairo X11 backend uses Xrender by default. Also many GTK 2.x rendering backends used Xrender. All of this functionality was dropped with GTK 3+.
- lamp987 5y ago