5 ms·

> Wait patiently for the pain points to be worked out Efficient remote desktop. Won't happen, ever. Simply cannot happen. Blits from offscreen to onscreen s

> Wait patiently for the pain points to be worked out Efficient remote desktop. Won't happen, ever. Simply cannot happen. Blits from offscreen to onscreen surfaces bypass the compositor, so it can't implement them as RDP commands and instead has to push the whole image across the pipe every time. This is why xorgxrdp is so crazy fast and responsive compared to every single Wayland RDP server. I use sway (a Wayland compositor) on all my machines. But all of my headless machines run xorgxrdp because there is nothing in the Wayland world that is even close. This is a fundamental problem with Wayland that cannot be fixed until there is a perspective change on the Wayland committees. Sending surface-to-surface-copy commands through the compositor clashes with their worldview, but without it we will never have decent remote display -- even (as they say) as "the task of a higher-layer protocol".

jchw 4y ago
That’s fine, but applications that can efficiently do that are slowly disappearing in favor of direct hardware acceleration, with software rendered offscreen rendering as the fallback, so those days are quite numbered now. That said, the best way to go in the future is probably going to be something more like waypipe. edit: People seem skeptical, but… GTK4: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gtk4-efficiency-and-performance-in-x11-export-remote-drawing-mode/8786/2 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gtk4-efficiency-and-performanc... Qt 5: https://forum.qt.io/topic/67371/x11-forwarding-slow-on-qt-5-applications https://forum.qt.io/topic/67371/x11-forwarding-slow-on-qt-5-... Electron/Chromium: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/5243 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/5243 Even my terminal emulator of choice; only fallback is software rendering. Hope you can stomach video codecs, because that’s where we’re headed unless you stop updating your software.
- bandrami 4y ago
  > so those days are quite numbered now. Yes, I've been hearing that for 14 years now about several workflows Wayland broke (remote clients, etc.) and it keeps not happening.
  - jchw 4y ago
    I'm happy to take bets on it.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    Current GNOME has RDP server build-in. It is a bit cumbersome, but it is there, works, and the cumbersomeness will be improved upon.
    - bandrami 4y ago
      RDP is not remotely (no pun intended) the same thing. It solves an entirely different class of problem.
      - vetinari 4y ago
        RDP is not that different from networked X11 as you think it is. RDP originally also transmitted GDI commands, just like X11 transmitted X11 commands. RDP can also remote only a single app (it is called RemoteApp), it is not bound to remoting entire desktop. Actually, Wayland apps running under WSLg use RDP underneath to integrate with the Windows desktop.
- uecker 4y ago
  Yes, it is really heart breaking how the Linux desktop is regressing. Instead of polishing the experience and focusing replacing Xlib with XCB which would make it possible to have excellent native performance, a huge amount of resources are invested in rewriting everything for Wayland. Now more than a decade later, things are still not even working properly (yes, maybe it works for you), with no credible plan for remote desktop, and instead toolkits just getting worse for X11. And then I have to say, from an engineering perspective, I find X to have vastly superior design (despite all the propaganda otherwise).
  - vetinari 4y ago
    Even under Windows, GDI days are over and RDP has to work with the modern toolkits, so nowadays it is h.264 streaming anyway. So basically the same as with Wayland.
  - jchw 4y ago
    Yes, upending the whole stack takes a while. X itself took a long time too. The thing is, it’s not a race. It’s OK for it to take decades.
- erik_seaberg 4y ago
  > slowly disappearing in favor of direct hardware acceleration In favor of software rendering, because datacenters mostly don’t have that hardware. X11 is more likely to be replaced by Javascript apps than Wayland apps because even going through a browser to a canvas is a better remoting story than sending entire CPU-rendered video frames to a desktop with a GPU that’s nearly untapped.
  - jchw 4y ago
    It seems you are implying you run X applications in a datacenter and have them piped to display locally. At that point, I have to ask, why? I’m sure you’re not alone, but this is not a common use case in my experience. It seems like some applications have been adapting their architecture to deal with the remoting use case. VS Code is widely publicized for supporting it, but I personally also use Neovim which is capable of doing similar things, and IIRC even Jetbrains has been working on this. Of course, that covers code editing, but only code editing. So that still leaves a lot out. That said, these solutions have very good UX and portability, so it’s easy to see why people prefer that. Let’s say the world went Wayland. What do you do about the other stuff? Well, there’s not nothing that can be done. For one thing, while I do think that the XRender world of abstraction is basically going to die, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no way that remoting could be improved. For example… it’s possible that some day, a solution like VirGL could allow hardware acceleration over a waypipe tunnel. And also, while Xorg is no longer being maintained, XWayland is still in scope for maintenance. So for the foreseeable future, you can still make use of X11 tunneling just fine under Wayland. Is this ideal? Maybe not. However, it’s perfectly practical, and therefore I don’t see why it wouldn’t be a decent solution. I expect mainstream desktops and apps to continue to support X11 apps for years to come, giving little urgency to worry all that much about the remoting case. As usual with software, the old thing is always deprecated before the new thing is ready. I’m pretty confident that Wayland has made the right architectural choices for the future, and now all that’s left for us is to fill in the blanks.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jchw 4y ago

That’s fine, but applications that can efficiently do that are slowly disappearing in favor of direct hardware acceleration, with software rendered offscreen rendering as the fallback, so those days are quite numbered now. That said, the best way to go in the future is probably going to be something more like waypipe. edit: People seem skeptical, but… GTK4: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gtk4-efficiency-and-performance-in-x11-export-remote-drawing-mode/8786/2 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gtk4-efficiency-and-performanc... Qt 5: https://forum.qt.io/topic/67371/x11-forwarding-slow-on-qt-5-applications https://forum.qt.io/topic/67371/x11-forwarding-slow-on-qt-5-... Electron/Chromium: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/5243 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/5243 Even my terminal emulator of choice; only fallback is software rendering. Hope you can stomach video codecs, because that’s where we’re headed unless you stop updating your software.

bandrami 4y ago
> so those days are quite numbered now. Yes, I've been hearing that for 14 years now about several workflows Wayland broke (remote clients, etc.) and it keeps not happening.
- jchw 4y ago
  I'm happy to take bets on it.
- vetinari 4y ago
  Current GNOME has RDP server build-in. It is a bit cumbersome, but it is there, works, and the cumbersomeness will be improved upon.
  - bandrami 4y ago
    RDP is not remotely (no pun intended) the same thing. It solves an entirely different class of problem.
    - vetinari 4y ago
      RDP is not that different from networked X11 as you think it is. RDP originally also transmitted GDI commands, just like X11 transmitted X11 commands. RDP can also remote only a single app (it is called RemoteApp), it is not bound to remoting entire desktop. Actually, Wayland apps running under WSLg use RDP underneath to integrate with the Windows desktop.
uecker 4y ago
Yes, it is really heart breaking how the Linux desktop is regressing. Instead of polishing the experience and focusing replacing Xlib with XCB which would make it possible to have excellent native performance, a huge amount of resources are invested in rewriting everything for Wayland. Now more than a decade later, things are still not even working properly (yes, maybe it works for you), with no credible plan for remote desktop, and instead toolkits just getting worse for X11. And then I have to say, from an engineering perspective, I find X to have vastly superior design (despite all the propaganda otherwise).
- vetinari 4y ago
  Even under Windows, GDI days are over and RDP has to work with the modern toolkits, so nowadays it is h.264 streaming anyway. So basically the same as with Wayland.
- jchw 4y ago
  Yes, upending the whole stack takes a while. X itself took a long time too. The thing is, it’s not a race. It’s OK for it to take decades.
erik_seaberg 4y ago
> slowly disappearing in favor of direct hardware acceleration In favor of software rendering, because datacenters mostly don’t have that hardware. X11 is more likely to be replaced by Javascript apps than Wayland apps because even going through a browser to a canvas is a better remoting story than sending entire CPU-rendered video frames to a desktop with a GPU that’s nearly untapped.
- jchw 4y ago
  It seems you are implying you run X applications in a datacenter and have them piped to display locally. At that point, I have to ask, why? I’m sure you’re not alone, but this is not a common use case in my experience. It seems like some applications have been adapting their architecture to deal with the remoting use case. VS Code is widely publicized for supporting it, but I personally also use Neovim which is capable of doing similar things, and IIRC even Jetbrains has been working on this. Of course, that covers code editing, but only code editing. So that still leaves a lot out. That said, these solutions have very good UX and portability, so it’s easy to see why people prefer that. Let’s say the world went Wayland. What do you do about the other stuff? Well, there’s not nothing that can be done. For one thing, while I do think that the XRender world of abstraction is basically going to die, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no way that remoting could be improved. For example… it’s possible that some day, a solution like VirGL could allow hardware acceleration over a waypipe tunnel. And also, while Xorg is no longer being maintained, XWayland is still in scope for maintenance. So for the foreseeable future, you can still make use of X11 tunneling just fine under Wayland. Is this ideal? Maybe not. However, it’s perfectly practical, and therefore I don’t see why it wouldn’t be a decent solution. I expect mainstream desktops and apps to continue to support X11 apps for years to come, giving little urgency to worry all that much about the remoting case. As usual with software, the old thing is always deprecated before the new thing is ready. I’m pretty confident that Wayland has made the right architectural choices for the future, and now all that’s left for us is to fill in the blanks.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]