4 ms·

It is pretty easy to do that with X11 and VNC.

bitwize 4y ago
No. It's not. Fast video playback and low latency was a requirement, and you can't do that over the wire with X11 or VNC. Pipewire is the solution for this. This is why SirCmpwn was right, and the anti-Wayland crowd needs to just shut up. Wayland+Pipewire is the future of remote desktop. Together they solve issues X11 by its nature cannot solve.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  What about X makes it fundamentally incapable of sending pixels off device at low latency?
  - bitwize 4y ago
    The X protocol is extremely chatty, does not compress images, and uses TCP. It's virtually impossible to make any sort of latency guarantees with that sort of protocol. Pipewire can use several compressed formats and the OP used UDP to stream the media off Pipewire to the remote display.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      Yeah, I know running X11 over the wire doesn't hold up, but that's not what's being done here with Wayland either; since we're locally grabbing pixels off the virtual display and then flinging them over the wire via custom UDP protocol, X11 vs pipewire only matters for the initial handover.
      - seba_dos1 4y ago
        The compositor may be able to transfer image data to PipeWire in zero-copy fashion, which may then be consumed by hardware video encoder without any copy on the path. I'm not sure whether you'd be able to do that using Xorg as display server.
  - luke-stanley 4y ago
    Actually it is possible to do low latency while using X server (for those not on Wayland), but it seems much faster to stream a video of the screen area than to use X protocol directly (which I have often used over SSH in the past to control another desktop system) - Xpra seems much faster to me. I've tried x11vnc too. Xpra is cool. Just my subjective experience, but proper benchmark stats would be cool to see.
- nocman 4y ago
  > the anti-Wayland crowd needs to just shut up I think telling people to shut up is a fast way to shut down valuable discussion. We can have good discussions about the value of particular technologies without being uncivil. Having strong opinions makes it easy to be unkind (especially online). I admit I also struggle with this. I think everyone could dial it down a bit from time to time.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  >the anti-Wayland crowd needs to just shut up. Maybe there wouldn't be a substantial antiwayland crowd if wayland proponents hadn't started saying that when wayland was an impractical mess years from being ready back in 2015-2017 Offering a superset of functionality in a prominent option without major downsides might have worked too. At least it would have worked better than offering limitations and telling people to shut up and deal with it.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    The Wayland architecture was decided on because it offers performance and security in a way that mirrors how the graphics stack actually works. So says everyone with deep subject matter knowledge about the graphics stack. The Wayland debate is like the global-warming debate: on one side are the experts, and on the other side are grognards and reactionaries.
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      Analogies are like assholes. They usually stink. > Analogies are false understandings. They confuse patterns for truth, but the evidence for these patterns are often based on further analogies or tenuous connections. The human mind looks for patterns, and isn’t above creating the patterns that it wants to see. https://mattwriteswords.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/why-analogies-suck/ https://mattwriteswords.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/why-analogi... Its most often true that what is different between the analogy and the real is more important than what is the same and that deconstructing the simulacrum and the thing is more complicated and convoluted than simply speaking plain words about boring facts. For example the global warming debate at it's simplest is two groups arguing for binary and mutually exclusive choices. Either the earth is getting warmer or it's not. Either its caused by our actions or its not and we all live in the same environment so if I'm wrong you are right or vice versa. Meanwhile Wayland and X are only mutually exclusive in the same session you can in fact log out of one and into the other between one comment and the other if you please. Or you can use Wayland and I can use X to have this very conservation which is in fact very likely what is happening right now. The same way I can use Firefox and you can use Chromium if you prefer. Both Wayland and X offer an abstraction on how the graphics stack actually works. An abstraction no users should give two shits about because nobody on earth cares about plumbing until the water doesn't come out when you turn the knob. A user cares about the system as a level of abstraction where they click a button and a window appears. What they don't want to do is change a damn thing about how they use their computer or accept even the slightest decrease in functionality in order to personally accommodate a difference in plumbing while opting out is entirely trivial. To ignore "advances" in plumbing that don't yield advances in practice doesn't make one a reactionary or a grognard it simple pragmatism. When was the last time you saw someone say "Let me buy this ugly car that doesn't turn so well because the way the engine is laid out really sparks joy!" It is the conceit of someone who really does care about how the engine is laid out to suppose that people ought to care about that rather than how it is actually experienced by the user. For example Ubuntu didn't get a version that could actually accelerate xwayland windows under Nvidia until last month and it still suffers from bugs not apparent under X. Furthermore any setup that requires fractional scaling or mixed DPI will result in a xwayland apps looking like a blurry mess so you either need to stay away from such configurations that work entirely fine under X or exclude any apps that aren't wayland native from your computer. Some of us would prefer to simply using our computers instead of beta testing the future and putting up with limitations for someone else's sense of aesthetics. Posted from Firefox running on X11 with 3 monitors with 3 different DPIs attached to an Nvidia GPU wherein all outputs are perfectly scaled to be identical and everything is crisp and clear.

No. It's not. Fast video playback and low latency was a requirement, and you can't do that over the wire with X11 or VNC. Pipewire is the solution for this. This is why SirCmpwn was right, and the anti-Wayland crowd needs to just shut up. Wayland+Pipewire is the future of remote desktop. Together they solve issues X11 by its nature cannot solve.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
What about X makes it fundamentally incapable of sending pixels off device at low latency?
- bitwize 4y ago
  The X protocol is extremely chatty, does not compress images, and uses TCP. It's virtually impossible to make any sort of latency guarantees with that sort of protocol. Pipewire can use several compressed formats and the OP used UDP to stream the media off Pipewire to the remote display.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Yeah, I know running X11 over the wire doesn't hold up, but that's not what's being done here with Wayland either; since we're locally grabbing pixels off the virtual display and then flinging them over the wire via custom UDP protocol, X11 vs pipewire only matters for the initial handover.
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      The compositor may be able to transfer image data to PipeWire in zero-copy fashion, which may then be consumed by hardware video encoder without any copy on the path. I'm not sure whether you'd be able to do that using Xorg as display server.
- luke-stanley 4y ago
  Actually it is possible to do low latency while using X server (for those not on Wayland), but it seems much faster to stream a video of the screen area than to use X protocol directly (which I have often used over SSH in the past to control another desktop system) - Xpra seems much faster to me. I've tried x11vnc too. Xpra is cool. Just my subjective experience, but proper benchmark stats would be cool to see.
nocman 4y ago
> the anti-Wayland crowd needs to just shut up I think telling people to shut up is a fast way to shut down valuable discussion. We can have good discussions about the value of particular technologies without being uncivil. Having strong opinions makes it easy to be unkind (especially online). I admit I also struggle with this. I think everyone could dial it down a bit from time to time.
michaelmrose 4y ago
>the anti-Wayland crowd needs to just shut up. Maybe there wouldn't be a substantial antiwayland crowd if wayland proponents hadn't started saying that when wayland was an impractical mess years from being ready back in 2015-2017 Offering a superset of functionality in a prominent option without major downsides might have worked too. At least it would have worked better than offering limitations and telling people to shut up and deal with it.
- bitwize 4y ago
  The Wayland architecture was decided on because it offers performance and security in a way that mirrors how the graphics stack actually works. So says everyone with deep subject matter knowledge about the graphics stack. The Wayland debate is like the global-warming debate: on one side are the experts, and on the other side are grognards and reactionaries.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    Analogies are like assholes. They usually stink. > Analogies are false understandings. They confuse patterns for truth, but the evidence for these patterns are often based on further analogies or tenuous connections. The human mind looks for patterns, and isn’t above creating the patterns that it wants to see. https://mattwriteswords.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/why-analogies-suck/ https://mattwriteswords.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/why-analogi... Its most often true that what is different between the analogy and the real is more important than what is the same and that deconstructing the simulacrum and the thing is more complicated and convoluted than simply speaking plain words about boring facts. For example the global warming debate at it's simplest is two groups arguing for binary and mutually exclusive choices. Either the earth is getting warmer or it's not. Either its caused by our actions or its not and we all live in the same environment so if I'm wrong you are right or vice versa. Meanwhile Wayland and X are only mutually exclusive in the same session you can in fact log out of one and into the other between one comment and the other if you please. Or you can use Wayland and I can use X to have this very conservation which is in fact very likely what is happening right now. The same way I can use Firefox and you can use Chromium if you prefer. Both Wayland and X offer an abstraction on how the graphics stack actually works. An abstraction no users should give two shits about because nobody on earth cares about plumbing until the water doesn't come out when you turn the knob. A user cares about the system as a level of abstraction where they click a button and a window appears. What they don't want to do is change a damn thing about how they use their computer or accept even the slightest decrease in functionality in order to personally accommodate a difference in plumbing while opting out is entirely trivial. To ignore "advances" in plumbing that don't yield advances in practice doesn't make one a reactionary or a grognard it simple pragmatism. When was the last time you saw someone say "Let me buy this ugly car that doesn't turn so well because the way the engine is laid out really sparks joy!" It is the conceit of someone who really does care about how the engine is laid out to suppose that people ought to care about that rather than how it is actually experienced by the user. For example Ubuntu didn't get a version that could actually accelerate xwayland windows under Nvidia until last month and it still suffers from bugs not apparent under X. Furthermore any setup that requires fractional scaling or mixed DPI will result in a xwayland apps looking like a blurry mess so you either need to stay away from such configurations that work entirely fine under X or exclude any apps that aren't wayland native from your computer. Some of us would prefer to simply using our computers instead of beta testing the future and putting up with limitations for someone else's sense of aesthetics. Posted from Firefox running on X11 with 3 monitors with 3 different DPIs attached to an Nvidia GPU wherein all outputs are perfectly scaled to be identical and everything is crisp and clear.