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From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland "The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture." X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. That is, the Gimp runs on your home machine while your notebook has the GUI. This is a lot to give up for cool compositing effects...

mkl 4y ago
https://arewewaylandyet.com/ https://arewewaylandyet.com/ lists Waypipe as a kind of equivalent for that. I haven't tried it; does anyone know how well it works? It also lists FreeRDP and wayvnc.
- kirbyfan64sos 4y ago
  I've used it successfully several years ago, it was a bit rough around the edges but already worked well; I'd imagine that's only improved since.
mccorrinall 4y ago
I actually still use this feature a lot. I run some linux software on a server and can see the window on my main desktop without any need for rdp, vnc or similar. It’s really great!
tryauuum 4y ago
...and it's usually extremely slow, even if you are connected via 1Gbit wire. Edit: replaced 10Gbit with 1Gbit. And also I love using this feature even with all its slowness
skykooler 4y ago
On the other hand, this works increasingly poorly as most desktop environments and software assumes there is no network involved (for example, last time I tried running Firefox over a forwarded X session I got a bunch of errors about a broken GL context). And you can do the same thing, with usually better results, by using VNC instead (and there are indeed VNC servers for Wayland, for example wayvnc).
- ajb 4y ago
  Just had to use Firefox remotely (to use WeTransfer to ship a giant file, they dropped support for their cli, grr), and had exactly this issue - it works incredibly slowly over X over SSH. In the end had to use vnc over SSH. (Note that tightvncserver seems to silently ignore the -localhost option now, which means it's completely insecure to run on an internet connected machine. Tigervnc still has the option)
  - benibela 4y ago
    The issue is the new webrenderer or how it is called. There are options in about:config to disable it and force the old webrenderer. Then it can runs rather fast on X over SSH in LAN and somewhat okayish through the internet. Ten years ago I was using it all the time and it was very fast over the internet and perhaps even through Tor. I do not know how they could mess it up so badly
- fsckboy 4y ago
  I'm not sure what experience you're describing, for me the real crime trying to run a remote Firefox over a forwarded X session is that it figures out you're doing that and instead decides to run another window of your local Firefox instance. It's been like that a few years now. I can't imagine what they're doing under the hood, haven't looked into it, but it sure is irritating.
  - drdec 4y ago
    It's not detecting that you are trying to run remote. That's just the default behavior of the firefox command, to use the running instance of there is one. IIRC, there is an option you can pass on the command line to get around it.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
Without x2go most apps aren't usable over the internet now because x11 was designed around assumptions that are no longer correct and you end up with multiple round-trips during rendering. Even X2go provides an experience that's strictly worse than using windows via rdp. It just seems completely pointless to even bother with something x11's network transparency if you're designing an x11 replacement nowadays. It would be much better to focus on a new vnc replacement for Linux that can use low latency video codecs when needed for games, etc.
- sprash 4y ago
  > x11 was designed around assumptions that are no longer correct Nothing could be further from the truth. If you use Xrender properly you can make very sophisticated drawing operations that are extremely efficient over the wire and that are GPU accelerated even when the process does not run on the local machine. It is Gtk and Qt that for wahtever reason decided to ditch their Xrender backends. > multiple round-trips This is also a problem introduced by badly designed tool-kits like Gtk and Qt. It is trivial to design tool-kits in X11 that require no round-trips. > It just seems completely pointless to even bother with something x11's network transparency This is mostly true because desktop software on Linux is mostly written by highly incompetent developers that produced abominations like Gtk3+.
  - jcelerier 4y ago
    Qt didn't ditch it. I use it all the time. If you have Debian it's compiled-in by default - just set QT_XCB_NATIVE_PAINTING=1
    - customkitchen 4y ago
      That flag has been broken for years: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-70387 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-70387 I doubt it will ever be fixed, because it offers no benefits when the application itself uses actual hardware rendering with GL or Vulkan. XCB can't speed that up at all.
colordrops 4y ago
It's a lot more than just cool compositing effects. If you are just trying to get some work done reliably with a dynamic multimonitor setup, Wayland is vastly superior.
adamzegelin 4y ago
You can also use Gimp via a RDP or VNC session, which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections, since those protocols do damage detection, only sending updates of what's changed, and (lossy) compression. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the whole X11 is network transparent thing worked great when apps used the X11 drawing primitives. These days a significant number of X11 apps just render _everything_ (often including window decorations) "server-side" as bitmaps and then send them over the wire to the client to composite them. Essentially the X11 wire protocol has become a bitmap pipe. Wayland does the "bitmap pipe" thing more efficiently than X11.
- testermelon 4y ago
  > These days a significant number of X11 apps just render _everything_ "server-side" as bitmaps and then send them over the wire to the client to composite them. Inferring from the quotation, I take it you mean application server-side (instead of display server-side)? Just confirming.
  - gunapologist99 4y ago
    Exactly. If GP doesn't even know how X11 works, then the opinion probably shouldn't carry a lot of weight. The "server" in X11 is the display that's sitting in front of you, not the application running on a remote workstation.
- amelius 4y ago
  Very much this. Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore. By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression? Also, VNC could be better if it could increase the quality of parts of the screen once they stop updating. E.g. in TigerVNC setting a low bitrate doesn't improve the quality of text once the text stops changing.
  - chpatrick 4y ago
    https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. How practical is that? I have horrible upload speed at home which ruins all these "just remote into your home machine" workflows for anything more than a terminal.
- loeg 4y ago
  Not at all practical. Remote X11 isn’t really practical on a LAN, much less over a slower internet link. It’s cool in theory but not especially useful.
echelon 4y ago
> This is a lot to give up for cool compositing effects... I've used networked X windows and it's always felt like a kludgy, crash-prone hack. The better solution is to render the entire desktop remotely and stream it over wholesale, such as with VNC and other protocols. If companies like YC's Mighty have their way, the future will be thin-client based. And it won't be built on X Windows, because that's the wrong layer of abstraction.
- jcelerier 4y ago
  streaming the entire desktop is an absolutely horrendous experience when compared to just ssh -X and running the app I want
  - XorNot 4y ago
    Under Wayland you'd just be sending the window you want instead. RDP can do this too, the point is that rendering remote is just plain more efficient.
  - aseipp 4y ago
    Run 'waypipe ssh user@machine firefox' and you are done.
atq2119 4y ago
Realistically speaking, what matters is that openssh comes with X11 forwarding built-in. Somebody should go and provide equally seamless "Wayland forwarding". That might end up looking more like VNC under the hood, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  Wayland forwarding has been there for years now: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe Is it seamless enough for what you had in mind?
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I think GP was talking about how ssh has the -X and -Y flags for forwarding X, but you need to do something like -L XXXX:localhost:YYYY to ssh forward. TigerVNC (and some others) will do e.g. "-via foo@bar :1" which GP might not know, but is rather convenient. Xpra is still a better replacement for -X when launching a single application though.
    - atq2119 4y ago
      Yes, that's what I meant, and thanks, those are interesting points. My main use case is launching one-off visualization tools on a remote system that I'm ssh'd to anyway. ssh -X is hard to beat in terms of convenience for that use case, and e.g. a persistence setup would be overkill.
      - pedrocr 4y ago
        From the linked waypipe page the usage is: waypipe ssh <user>@<server> <app> That will call ssh with the correct parameters on both sides and start the app. Seems just about perfect for what people want out of a remote solution that's not a full desktop.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
> This is a lot to give up for cool compositing effects... Wait, you think this is what this is all about? How about the cool security effects...?!
- dijit 4y ago
  Support for mixed DPI effects? Lack of tearing without vsync… effects?
stefan_ 4y ago
X11 is the worst remote protocol in the world because save for about one year, it was never developed with that application in mind.
ISL 4y ago
I used X tunneling over ssh regularly from 2001-2020, when I left that line of work. For some applications it is radically faster than other options.
scottlamb 4y ago
> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. That is, the Gimp runs on your home machine while your notebook has the GUI. But that's never where I want the split to be when working across the network. Remote storage? Sure, sign me up. (The POSIX APIs are horribly unsuitable for network filesystems, but I'm speaking about the concept more than the current implementations.) Remote heavy computations, like AI workloads and compilation? Definitely. Remote GUI code? No ugh. Compare the experience of VS Code Remote vs just running VS Code remotely with ssh X11 forwarding, using a high latency connection. You are fighting the speed of light. It won't go well.
- bluedino 4y ago
  NICE DCV works really well as a remote Linux desktop. Not sure what it runs underneath.
  - scottlamb 4y ago
    It's certainly possible to do better than raw X11 across the network. Other folks mentioned VLC, RDP, and NX too. I assume these protocols reduce bandwidth usage by compression. Sometimes you can even do prediction (as with mosh for ttys or Stadia for games). The best is always going to be to use a local copy of the logic and data needed most frequently/immediately. E.g. in the VS Code example, they keep the buffer you're editing locally, the logic for cursor movements, the errors you're flipping through, and maybe even some precached autocompletion/highlight stuff. You don't have to wait for a round trip to see your keystrokes show up. That's the advantage of splitting the system in the right place.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gnull 4y ago
  I never had to do it myself, but I have a feeling it will work better with Wayland. The delay of 50-80ms introduced by the network is not terribly much (everything under 110ms is fine for playing Dota), so if your software doesn't lag itself, like X11 did, maybe it will work. You could also use something like Zerotier-one to recover from network being shortly disrupted. This service connects your machines into a virtual network with static IPs, so the IP addresses through which your machines talk will stay the same and TCP connections will recover and ssh will keep working if a device briefly goes offline.
bayindirh 4y ago
I don't know whether you used Remote X, but I used it in a project, and it's extremely inefficient, esp. in thin client applications, and if you try to carry anything like a video, a 100mbps connection could easily be saturated by one pair of X server and client. In other words, it doesn't work in any way unless you have a gigabit LAN. NoMachine developed a couple of libraries called NX back in the day, which transferred images and image deltas over with high compression. We used this instead via in the same project (with X2Go), and I reimplemented the same stack to my university where 20 something users connected remotely to a single "terminal" server to do remote research, and it worked like a charm. While I like Remote X, it's still very inefficient even today. So, unless it's made extremely efficient over normal internet, over residential connections, it won't be missed. Moreover, the rarity of projects using Remote X, or abstracting it with libraries like NoMachine kinda validates the idea is the feature is considered a novelty and not used much. While I like the feature, I have feeling that it won't be missed or sought after much. On the other hand what killed X is its code state, rather than the complex architecture. It's haphazard development over the years which made the code unmaintainable. Addendum: Remote X made sense back in the day. Carrying minimal data, mostly terminal windows between terminals and central mainframe/time sharing system, over relatively short distances. I guess it's never designed and considered for long distances like today's internet, hence it's left to the wayside.
- aliqot 4y ago
  Remote X has been a godsend for me. I'm not always able to lug around a worthy machine, so being able to use lesser hardware as a 'thinclient' to my wireguard'd assets is very handy. Obviously I'm not going to expect high definition video or realtime gaming, but that's not what it's billed as either, so within the scope of what it's for I'm wholly satisfied. People on both sides sound somewhat fanatic, and I've never understood that. I just want to use what serves me best with the fewest interruptions. I ran wayland for 3 years in various forms, and could not reconcile the bumps and stumbles in the process. Maybe next year I'll give it a shot again. There has to be something that it's doing for everyone for me to be hearing this much about it still.
  - jacob019 4y ago
seba_dos1 4y ago
You don't need to have it baked into the core protocol for it to work. Waypipe works pretty well for running Wayland clients remotely.
tails4e 4y ago
I use remote display of apps daily as part or work. I've a Linux VM, and all compute or memory intensive programs run on LSF with x11 forwarding or via direct login. Sure desktop users don't need the remote part, but enterprise / high end compute definitely does
melling 4y ago
“The Network is the Computer” For a time I had lots of xterms, emacs sessions, etc running across the network. It’s a great feature.
modeless 4y ago
RDP works better in practice than X11 over medium bandwidth and/or high latency connections. Nothing is being lost.
donatj 4y ago
A friend had an oscilloscope that worked like this. X across the network.
admax88qqq 4y ago
> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. It would be cool but to be good all apps would have to be designed with it in mind. And they are not. The software moves on from X11 as a protocol for remote computing. Even well before Wayland, all the things you'd use X over the network for were moved to web browsers.
- gpm 4y ago
  I've used it in the past month to impromptu demonstrate something that I had set up on a GUI app at home (with a lot of dependencies) from my laptop. Yes, it's laggy, but it's nice to have the option, and it's really nice that it's already integrated with ssh and doesn't need extra setup (past passing `-Y` to ssh). If this was the only thing I'd lose by switching window managers it wouldn't be a dealbreaker.
- II2II 4y ago
  > Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. I did, nearly 20 years ago. The computers were over 2500 km apart, though it was over a good university to university connection. The Gimp was certainly usable, though I will not go as far as saying it was good since 20 year old memories can be hazy and the standards of the day are different from the standards of today. I also experimented with X over a 14.4 kbps modem a few years earlier. It was mostly while writing papers (plotting graphs and viewing dvi files, not the actual writing). It was slow, but it got the job done and was better than juggling documents between software on two computers. The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop. All of this remote desktop stuff strikes me as being better suited for accessing a remote system, rather than for running remote software.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    > The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop That sounds like a UX problem that’s quite trivial to fix, not a technical one and absolutely not inherent with Wayland.
lostapathy 4y ago
> That is, the Gimp runs on your home machine while your notebook has the GUI. Have you actually tried that in recent years? In my experience not much actually works this way anymore, the performance is just terrible.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  This. It takes hundreds of megabits per second to work smoothly. If you're doing this while on the move, your mobile data is going to be gone in a literal matter of seconds, if the network were fast enough to support it, which it isn't so in reality you're going to be frustrated and wondering why you didn't use a different protocol. From VM to host or on gigabit LAN it works okay, which is where I've used it before. I used X forwarding a lot until last year, so I can find various arguments for it, but "while on the move" makes absolutely no sense.
gnull 4y ago
Each time I tried running Firefox over ssh with X11 it either lagged or crashed. With Wayland's Waypipe it works flawlessly, I could even watch a Youtube video through it. I'm double checking it right now using a remove machine a few blocks away from my home. Running `ssh -X remote firefox` lags a lot worse than `waypipe ssh remote firefox`. The latter feels almost native, very responsive. So no, I don't think we are giving up a lot. X11 was designed to work over network, but it never really did.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > I could even watch a Youtube video through it. Watching a Youtube video on remote X is rarely a problem, there's no latency involved.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Wat?
    - dbrgn 4y ago
      I guess GP meant input latency (since there's no input if you're just consuming a video stream).
    - ur-whale 4y ago
      Streaming is most sensitive to how much data you can push through the pipe in a given amount of time, not to how long it takes for a question/answer pair to travel between the server and the client. Latency (how long it takes for messages to travel back and forth), which is where X11 over the network has major issue, doesn't matter in the specific case of watching a video. Essentially, once you press 'play', there's just a torrent of data flowing down from the server to the client with very little need for two-way banter between the machines.
      - arghwhat 4y ago
        Yeah, no - X11 forwarding a video is at best "eh" when you're network local, and horrible otherwise. X11 forwarding burns a lot of bandwidth, and even when that bandwidth is available, going over TCP and SSH makes it implicitly quite latency sensitive. It's not even fair to compare it to waypipe's h264 compressed buffer feeds.
xani_ 4y ago
I used that feature very rarely but the times I did it was insanely useful. Mostly running some debug software so debugging session could run locally but I could control it remotely, without installing whole graphical environment and somehow setting up vnc session just to run single app
luckydata 4y ago
It's nothing anyone actually needs.
mgraczyk 4y ago
What percent of Linux users do you think would ever use software this way? What percent of all "desktop" OS users would ever use software this way? It seems like an extremely niche and rare use case and probably not the right thing to target for the main desktop environment. I've been using Linux as my main OS for ~12 years now. I have personally never wanted to do anything like that. For remote software, I would prefer a web UI or a VNC/remote-desktop tool.
- dima55 4y ago
  X-forwarding (over ssh, or directly like this person is doing) is extremely useful and powerful. I use it this way, and I know plenty of people that do too. On top of that, wayland doesn't solve any problems that I have, so there's your data point.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    Sure, but my guess is that <1% of Linux users currently use X forwarding, and probably <0.01% of desktop OS users would ever want something like this. It's a cool feature that should exist, but rare enough that it doesn't need to be fundamental to desktop architecture.
- drdebug 4y ago
  Using a wayland desktop, remote login into a Linux server, start a graphical text editor like gvim, it fails. This is a very common way to dev on Linux, I too have been doing this daily, and with ssh+X11 it works out of the box. I wonder what is the best way to do this with Wayland. Should I ask an admin to reconfigure the remote server to run a VNC or RDP server, and then use a specific tool to connect? I wonder if VNC/RDP can integrate apps as windows instead of all-in-one window.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    I do something similar with vim, no gui. I use vim over ssh with tmux. Others I know use vs code with an ssh backend. These two make up the workflow of roughly 60000 Googlers. None of them need X forwarding. Some people may benefit from X forwarding, but the vast majority of Linux users do not.
kelnos 4y ago
I used to use X11's network transparency features a lot in college[0], but it's been a good 20 years and I haven't used it since -- even once. I, too, am not comfortable with throwing away such a potentially useful feature (though I believe there's a wayland "protocol" or something that allows for network transparency now), but I personally don't have a need for it. [0] One of our VLSI design labs was a FreeBSD lab, and the machines there had a bunch of proprietary/paid simulation software on them. It was amazing to be able to ssh in from my dorm room, and run those apps "locally", with access to all my files on the network share. A few of my classmates wondered why I never pulled all-nighters in the lab with them... I never needed to! They all ran Windows at home; back then it was pretty difficult (or at least just kinda unknown) to run an X server on Windows.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  I use it quite often. And I am dreading the day the office switches to wayland. I like having terminals open to several machines on the premises and being able to fire up individual applications from each. I don't really like having a workspace devoted to a vnc for each machine. It doesn't work as well. It makes me use the mouse more. I don't want windows into those machines. I want a gui on my machine hooked to the heavy lifting on another. I'm sure I'll adapt. But sonfar, its a productivity killer.
diffeomorphism 4y ago
Considering there is waypipe, what exactly is being "given up"?
kaba0 4y ago
And any program not made with goddamn XMotif will be slow as fuck on anything non-ethernet. It is a strictly worse solution to remote desktoping than what followed it — we are no longer drawing things with CPU and the things we draw are not 3 rectangles. A bitmap crossing the wire for an icon/image/whatever is insanely inefficient through the X protocol, you want to compress it with a modern compression algorithm for much better outcome.
knorker 4y ago
As someone who used to run actual X terminals, diskless purpose built appliances that only ran the X server, I'd say this only really worked on a LAN. It never actually worked "on the road". VNC and windows remote desktop was always better.
tjoff 4y ago
You don't loose anything. Open up gimp remotely on the road, try it. It isn't usable ny any stretch of imagination. That is why we need hacks such as x2go to make it usable. Even the worst RDP solution is orders of magnitude better in performance than X11.
michelb 4y ago
I think that is a great feature. I'd also like to see how often it is used given today's workflows.
pizza234 4y ago
I'd be a big fan if that worked, but I haven't found an open remote desktop solution on Linux that works out of the box and acceptably fast¹, to the point that I have to use proprietary software to perform remote desktop sessions - there is a huge gap between the open solutions and the proprietary ones². ¹=they're all either incredibly slow, or clunky to configure/use. interestingly, X2Go, which I think was working out of the box, but was too slow, is based on an old version of the Nomachine (NX) protocol. ²=the recent RustDesk tries to fill that gap.
- arghwhat 4y ago
  waypipe[1] is the wayland equivalent people are looking for. It gives you the UX and ease of use of X11 forwarding, but with the performance and efficiency of things like RDP (which is gross, but can run quite well on Windows Server if you throw enough money at Microsoft). Wayland applications will render entirely on the host using host resources and acceleration as needed, buffer content gets transmitted using (hardware accelerated) h264 encoding, while messages in general get passed as-is to give a fully local experience. And it of course works over SSH. 1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe
mariusmg 4y ago
>you can use When was the last time you used this feature ? X11 is a protocol designed for machines which didn't have the power to draw a GUI locally. That time has long passed.
lucideer 4y ago
> This is a lot to give up For whom? Nobody is arguing it's not a great and powerful feature, nor that it's not "a lot to give up". The only argument posited is that not a lot of people will actually have to make that sacrifice (as not many actually use that feature). Is that not true?
arghwhat 4y ago
This is a big misunderstanding. Network handling is stripped from the core design, but is very much available on all compositors. The equivalent to X11 forwarding is waypipe[1], which is far superior to X11 forwarding. Rendering happens entirely on the host and clients can therefore use accelerated resources as they wish, and the (accelerated) h264 encoded buffer feeds means much lower network utilization. 1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe
- _flux 4y ago
  Low network utilization yes and perhaps superior to X11 core protocol, but it doesn't come for free, for example in terms of latency. And what if said app was actually a video player in it own self? Then you get to decode the video on server and re-encode it again for transport, whereas a primitive-centric protocol could allow decoding the original video directly on the client. The higher the window size the higher the requirements for the encoder (though Waypipe does say "This way, Waypipe can send only the regions of the buffer that have changed relative to the remote copy.", or is it talking about the video encoder?), whereas with primitive-based systems the requirements are only correlated to the amount of changes done on the display—while still allowing to use image or video encoder for tasks better suitable for it. I just fondly remember the times when (possibly two decades ago) I run xlockmore -mode ifs at work accidentally from my home computer and it was running fine over the 100Mbit network, so I didn't realize my mistake until coming back from lunch. Basically just a bunch of pixels running around smoothly, but I think it would be quite a quality test for a video encoder.. I understand though that coming up with a great protocol for user-interface primitives would be a research project in its own right, however. Perhaps something based on JavaScript, WASM, or EBPF fragments sent to the client would be a realistic options. Time has certainly gone past the primitives provided by X11. But I also think that just "forget about it, we'll video stream it" is just giving up on the problem altogether.
  - arghwhat 4y ago
    > Low network utilization yes and perhaps superior to X11 core protocol, but it doesn't come for free, for example in terms of latency. You can have your cake and eat it too: You can disable the compression if it's a problem. It's highly configurable if you want to play with it. The compression means trading a little bit of hardware resources at either end for a better UX (lower latency, higher throughput). > The higher the window size the higher the requirements for the encoder (though Waypipe does say "This way, Waypipe can send only the regions of the buffer that have changed relative to the remote copy.", or is it talking about the video encoder?). The core wayland protocol mandates communicating which parts of a "surface" (read: window) has changed when a new buffer is submitted in a "surface commit". Neither a compositor nor waypipe will do anything if nothing has changed. > I also think that just "forget about it, we'll video stream it" is just giving up on the problem altogether. Each surface has its own stream, and is updated independently. E.g., a video player on a webpage will generally be a subsurface, a context menu or plugin is a popup surface. They're all processed independently, with each their own damage tracking (and if applicable, video compression). If content is stretched or scaled up, only the original source buffer will be transmitted, allowing the display server to take care of this. This is not giving up, this is the maximum effort, optimal implementation. > I just fondly remember the times when (possibly two decades ago) I run ... over a 100Mbit network For reference, a single 4k 60Hz display takes ~15Gb/s to keep fed with bitmaps. Even a quarter of the screen takes 3.7Gb/s. Not even cinematic refresh rates would be able to fit within a 1Gb/s line.
wazoox 4y ago
I use X11 remotely daily (and did so for 25 years). It comes for free with a simple ssh login and doesn't require setting up any server on the remote machine. It just works (even if slowly at times). It beats setting up x2go/VNC/etc hands down.
zitsarethecure 4y ago
X11 is way too slow to run something like gimp remotely, unless perhaps you are sitting near the other machine connected via gigabit ethernet. Giving that up is an easy win for better everything else.
reidacdc 4y ago
It's in the "critical path" for certain niche applications. I do HPC operations, and every now and then, I run across some (usually commercial) scientific software application whose installer and/or configuration manager is a GUI. I am not sitting in front of the cluster head-node, I am ssh'd in to it. With X, I can just go ahead and fire up the GUI, and it will appear. Maybe a bit laggy, but as long as its only one application, it's usually good enough to complete the task I need to complete. With remote work and thin pipes, it's laggier, but "xpra" also allows per-application X forwarding, and removes a lot of the lag. Of course I could set up full VNC and set up a whole desktop environment on the cluster head node, and remote into it, and maybe in the glorious Wayland future, I will have to do that. Sometimes when I talk about this, someone in the comments says that Wayland is working on some kind of per-application forwardability -- that would be nice if it's true. I get that my use-case is niche, and so I don't expect it to be a high priority for the devs, but it's one of those things that, once in a while, is a critical link in my administrative workflow, and I'm not looking forward to the eventual kludging of workarounds. Edited to add: I have now seen the comment below about "waypipe", this sounds very promising!
phkahler 4y ago
>> X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. When I was in college there were rooms full of X-terminals which would be used to remote into various bigger workstations. You could also sit locally at one of those machines, but plenty could be done over the network and by more people on lower cost hardware.
thedougd 4y ago
This also gives you the freedom to remote selective applications rather than the whole desktop. X11 remoting took me to a new level in college, when I needed to use Solaris workstations to complete assignments.

mkl 4y ago

https://arewewaylandyet.com/ https://arewewaylandyet.com/ lists Waypipe as a kind of equivalent for that. I haven't tried it; does anyone know how well it works? It also lists FreeRDP and wayvnc.

kirbyfan64sos 4y ago
I've used it successfully several years ago, it was a bit rough around the edges but already worked well; I'd imagine that's only improved since.

mccorrinall 4y ago

I actually still use this feature a lot. I run some linux software on a server and can see the window on my main desktop without any need for rdp, vnc or similar. It’s really great!

tryauuum 4y ago

...and it's usually extremely slow, even if you are connected via 1Gbit wire. Edit: replaced 10Gbit with 1Gbit. And also I love using this feature even with all its slowness

skykooler 4y ago

On the other hand, this works increasingly poorly as most desktop environments and software assumes there is no network involved (for example, last time I tried running Firefox over a forwarded X session I got a bunch of errors about a broken GL context). And you can do the same thing, with usually better results, by using VNC instead (and there are indeed VNC servers for Wayland, for example wayvnc).

ajb 4y ago
Just had to use Firefox remotely (to use WeTransfer to ship a giant file, they dropped support for their cli, grr), and had exactly this issue - it works incredibly slowly over X over SSH. In the end had to use vnc over SSH. (Note that tightvncserver seems to silently ignore the -localhost option now, which means it's completely insecure to run on an internet connected machine. Tigervnc still has the option)
- benibela 4y ago
  The issue is the new webrenderer or how it is called. There are options in about:config to disable it and force the old webrenderer. Then it can runs rather fast on X over SSH in LAN and somewhat okayish through the internet. Ten years ago I was using it all the time and it was very fast over the internet and perhaps even through Tor. I do not know how they could mess it up so badly
fsckboy 4y ago
I'm not sure what experience you're describing, for me the real crime trying to run a remote Firefox over a forwarded X session is that it figures out you're doing that and instead decides to run another window of your local Firefox instance. It's been like that a few years now. I can't imagine what they're doing under the hood, haven't looked into it, but it sure is irritating.
- drdec 4y ago
  It's not detecting that you are trying to run remote. That's just the default behavior of the firefox command, to use the running instance of there is one. IIRC, there is an option you can pass on the command line to get around it.

resoluteteeth 4y ago

Without x2go most apps aren't usable over the internet now because x11 was designed around assumptions that are no longer correct and you end up with multiple round-trips during rendering. Even X2go provides an experience that's strictly worse than using windows via rdp. It just seems completely pointless to even bother with something x11's network transparency if you're designing an x11 replacement nowadays. It would be much better to focus on a new vnc replacement for Linux that can use low latency video codecs when needed for games, etc.

sprash 4y ago
> x11 was designed around assumptions that are no longer correct Nothing could be further from the truth. If you use Xrender properly you can make very sophisticated drawing operations that are extremely efficient over the wire and that are GPU accelerated even when the process does not run on the local machine. It is Gtk and Qt that for wahtever reason decided to ditch their Xrender backends. > multiple round-trips This is also a problem introduced by badly designed tool-kits like Gtk and Qt. It is trivial to design tool-kits in X11 that require no round-trips. > It just seems completely pointless to even bother with something x11's network transparency This is mostly true because desktop software on Linux is mostly written by highly incompetent developers that produced abominations like Gtk3+.
- jcelerier 4y ago
  Qt didn't ditch it. I use it all the time. If you have Debian it's compiled-in by default - just set QT_XCB_NATIVE_PAINTING=1
  - customkitchen 4y ago
    That flag has been broken for years: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-70387 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-70387 I doubt it will ever be fixed, because it offers no benefits when the application itself uses actual hardware rendering with GL or Vulkan. XCB can't speed that up at all.

colordrops 4y ago

It's a lot more than just cool compositing effects. If you are just trying to get some work done reliably with a dynamic multimonitor setup, Wayland is vastly superior.

adamzegelin 4y ago

You can also use Gimp via a RDP or VNC session, which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections, since those protocols do damage detection, only sending updates of what's changed, and (lossy) compression. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the whole X11 is network transparent thing worked great when apps used the X11 drawing primitives. These days a significant number of X11 apps just render _everything_ (often including window decorations) "server-side" as bitmaps and then send them over the wire to the client to composite them. Essentially the X11 wire protocol has become a bitmap pipe. Wayland does the "bitmap pipe" thing more efficiently than X11.

testermelon 4y ago
> These days a significant number of X11 apps just render _everything_ "server-side" as bitmaps and then send them over the wire to the client to composite them. Inferring from the quotation, I take it you mean application server-side (instead of display server-side)? Just confirming.
- gunapologist99 4y ago
  Exactly. If GP doesn't even know how X11 works, then the opinion probably shouldn't carry a lot of weight. The "server" in X11 is the display that's sitting in front of you, not the application running on a remote workstation.
amelius 4y ago
Very much this. Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore. By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression? Also, VNC could be better if it could increase the quality of parts of the screen once they stop updating. E.g. in TigerVNC setting a low bitrate doesn't improve the quality of text once the text stops changing.
- chpatrick 4y ago
  https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. How practical is that? I have horrible upload speed at home which ruins all these "just remote into your home machine" workflows for anything more than a terminal.

loeg 4y ago
Not at all practical. Remote X11 isn’t really practical on a LAN, much less over a slower internet link. It’s cool in theory but not especially useful.

echelon 4y ago

> This is a lot to give up for cool compositing effects... I've used networked X windows and it's always felt like a kludgy, crash-prone hack. The better solution is to render the entire desktop remotely and stream it over wholesale, such as with VNC and other protocols. If companies like YC's Mighty have their way, the future will be thin-client based. And it won't be built on X Windows, because that's the wrong layer of abstraction.

jcelerier 4y ago
streaming the entire desktop is an absolutely horrendous experience when compared to just ssh -X and running the app I want
- XorNot 4y ago
  Under Wayland you'd just be sending the window you want instead. RDP can do this too, the point is that rendering remote is just plain more efficient.
- aseipp 4y ago
  Run 'waypipe ssh user@machine firefox' and you are done.

atq2119 4y ago

Realistically speaking, what matters is that openssh comes with X11 forwarding built-in. Somebody should go and provide equally seamless "Wayland forwarding". That might end up looking more like VNC under the hood, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

seba_dos1 4y ago
Wayland forwarding has been there for years now: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe Is it seamless enough for what you had in mind?
- aidenn0 4y ago
  I think GP was talking about how ssh has the -X and -Y flags for forwarding X, but you need to do something like -L XXXX:localhost:YYYY to ssh forward. TigerVNC (and some others) will do e.g. "-via foo@bar :1" which GP might not know, but is rather convenient. Xpra is still a better replacement for -X when launching a single application though.
  - atq2119 4y ago
    Yes, that's what I meant, and thanks, those are interesting points. My main use case is launching one-off visualization tools on a remote system that I'm ssh'd to anyway. ssh -X is hard to beat in terms of convenience for that use case, and e.g. a persistence setup would be overkill.
    - pedrocr 4y ago
      From the linked waypipe page the usage is: waypipe ssh <user>@<server> <app> That will call ssh with the correct parameters on both sides and start the app. Seems just about perfect for what people want out of a remote solution that's not a full desktop.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

aaaaaaaaata 4y ago

> This is a lot to give up for cool compositing effects... Wait, you think this is what this is all about? How about the cool security effects...?!

dijit 4y ago
Support for mixed DPI effects? Lack of tearing without vsync… effects?

stefan_ 4y ago

X11 is the worst remote protocol in the world because save for about one year, it was never developed with that application in mind.

ISL 4y ago

I used X tunneling over ssh regularly from 2001-2020, when I left that line of work. For some applications it is radically faster than other options.

scottlamb 4y ago

> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. That is, the Gimp runs on your home machine while your notebook has the GUI. But that's never where I want the split to be when working across the network. Remote storage? Sure, sign me up. (The POSIX APIs are horribly unsuitable for network filesystems, but I'm speaking about the concept more than the current implementations.) Remote heavy computations, like AI workloads and compilation? Definitely. Remote GUI code? No ugh. Compare the experience of VS Code Remote vs just running VS Code remotely with ssh X11 forwarding, using a high latency connection. You are fighting the speed of light. It won't go well.

bluedino 4y ago
NICE DCV works really well as a remote Linux desktop. Not sure what it runs underneath.
- scottlamb 4y ago
  It's certainly possible to do better than raw X11 across the network. Other folks mentioned VLC, RDP, and NX too. I assume these protocols reduce bandwidth usage by compression. Sometimes you can even do prediction (as with mosh for ttys or Stadia for games). The best is always going to be to use a local copy of the logic and data needed most frequently/immediately. E.g. in the VS Code example, they keep the buffer you're editing locally, the logic for cursor movements, the errors you're flipping through, and maybe even some precached autocompletion/highlight stuff. You don't have to wait for a round trip to see your keystrokes show up. That's the advantage of splitting the system in the right place.
deleted 4y ago
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gnull 4y ago
I never had to do it myself, but I have a feeling it will work better with Wayland. The delay of 50-80ms introduced by the network is not terribly much (everything under 110ms is fine for playing Dota), so if your software doesn't lag itself, like X11 did, maybe it will work. You could also use something like Zerotier-one to recover from network being shortly disrupted. This service connects your machines into a virtual network with static IPs, so the IP addresses through which your machines talk will stay the same and TCP connections will recover and ssh will keep working if a device briefly goes offline.

bayindirh 4y ago

I don't know whether you used Remote X, but I used it in a project, and it's extremely inefficient, esp. in thin client applications, and if you try to carry anything like a video, a 100mbps connection could easily be saturated by one pair of X server and client. In other words, it doesn't work in any way unless you have a gigabit LAN. NoMachine developed a couple of libraries called NX back in the day, which transferred images and image deltas over with high compression. We used this instead via in the same project (with X2Go), and I reimplemented the same stack to my university where 20 something users connected remotely to a single "terminal" server to do remote research, and it worked like a charm. While I like Remote X, it's still very inefficient even today. So, unless it's made extremely efficient over normal internet, over residential connections, it won't be missed. Moreover, the rarity of projects using Remote X, or abstracting it with libraries like NoMachine kinda validates the idea is the feature is considered a novelty and not used much. While I like the feature, I have feeling that it won't be missed or sought after much. On the other hand what killed X is its code state, rather than the complex architecture. It's haphazard development over the years which made the code unmaintainable. Addendum: Remote X made sense back in the day. Carrying minimal data, mostly terminal windows between terminals and central mainframe/time sharing system, over relatively short distances. I guess it's never designed and considered for long distances like today's internet, hence it's left to the wayside.

aliqot 4y ago
Remote X has been a godsend for me. I'm not always able to lug around a worthy machine, so being able to use lesser hardware as a 'thinclient' to my wireguard'd assets is very handy. Obviously I'm not going to expect high definition video or realtime gaming, but that's not what it's billed as either, so within the scope of what it's for I'm wholly satisfied. People on both sides sound somewhat fanatic, and I've never understood that. I just want to use what serves me best with the fewest interruptions. I ran wayland for 3 years in various forms, and could not reconcile the bumps and stumbles in the process. Maybe next year I'll give it a shot again. There has to be something that it's doing for everyone for me to be hearing this much about it still.
- jacob019 4y ago

seba_dos1 4y ago

You don't need to have it baked into the core protocol for it to work. Waypipe works pretty well for running Wayland clients remotely.

tails4e 4y ago

I use remote display of apps daily as part or work. I've a Linux VM, and all compute or memory intensive programs run on LSF with x11 forwarding or via direct login. Sure desktop users don't need the remote part, but enterprise / high end compute definitely does

melling 4y ago

“The Network is the Computer” For a time I had lots of xterms, emacs sessions, etc running across the network. It’s a great feature.

modeless 4y ago

RDP works better in practice than X11 over medium bandwidth and/or high latency connections. Nothing is being lost.

donatj 4y ago

A friend had an oscilloscope that worked like this. X across the network.

admax88qqq 4y ago

> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. It would be cool but to be good all apps would have to be designed with it in mind. And they are not. The software moves on from X11 as a protocol for remote computing. Even well before Wayland, all the things you'd use X over the network for were moved to web browsers.

gpm 4y ago
I've used it in the past month to impromptu demonstrate something that I had set up on a GUI app at home (with a lot of dependencies) from my laptop. Yes, it's laggy, but it's nice to have the option, and it's really nice that it's already integrated with ssh and doesn't need extra setup (past passing `-Y` to ssh). If this was the only thing I'd lose by switching window managers it wouldn't be a dealbreaker.
II2II 4y ago
> Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. I did, nearly 20 years ago. The computers were over 2500 km apart, though it was over a good university to university connection. The Gimp was certainly usable, though I will not go as far as saying it was good since 20 year old memories can be hazy and the standards of the day are different from the standards of today. I also experimented with X over a 14.4 kbps modem a few years earlier. It was mostly while writing papers (plotting graphs and viewing dvi files, not the actual writing). It was slow, but it got the job done and was better than juggling documents between software on two computers. The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop. All of this remote desktop stuff strikes me as being better suited for accessing a remote system, rather than for running remote software.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop That sounds like a UX problem that’s quite trivial to fix, not a technical one and absolutely not inherent with Wayland.

lostapathy 4y ago

> That is, the Gimp runs on your home machine while your notebook has the GUI. Have you actually tried that in recent years? In my experience not much actually works this way anymore, the performance is just terrible.

lucb1e 4y ago
This. It takes hundreds of megabits per second to work smoothly. If you're doing this while on the move, your mobile data is going to be gone in a literal matter of seconds, if the network were fast enough to support it, which it isn't so in reality you're going to be frustrated and wondering why you didn't use a different protocol. From VM to host or on gigabit LAN it works okay, which is where I've used it before. I used X forwarding a lot until last year, so I can find various arguments for it, but "while on the move" makes absolutely no sense.

gnull 4y ago

Each time I tried running Firefox over ssh with X11 it either lagged or crashed. With Wayland's Waypipe it works flawlessly, I could even watch a Youtube video through it. I'm double checking it right now using a remove machine a few blocks away from my home. Running `ssh -X remote firefox` lags a lot worse than `waypipe ssh remote firefox`. The latter feels almost native, very responsive. So no, I don't think we are giving up a lot. X11 was designed to work over network, but it never really did.

ur-whale 4y ago
> I could even watch a Youtube video through it. Watching a Youtube video on remote X is rarely a problem, there's no latency involved.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Wat?
  - dbrgn 4y ago
    I guess GP meant input latency (since there's no input if you're just consuming a video stream).
  - ur-whale 4y ago
    Streaming is most sensitive to how much data you can push through the pipe in a given amount of time, not to how long it takes for a question/answer pair to travel between the server and the client. Latency (how long it takes for messages to travel back and forth), which is where X11 over the network has major issue, doesn't matter in the specific case of watching a video. Essentially, once you press 'play', there's just a torrent of data flowing down from the server to the client with very little need for two-way banter between the machines.
    - arghwhat 4y ago
      Yeah, no - X11 forwarding a video is at best "eh" when you're network local, and horrible otherwise. X11 forwarding burns a lot of bandwidth, and even when that bandwidth is available, going over TCP and SSH makes it implicitly quite latency sensitive. It's not even fair to compare it to waypipe's h264 compressed buffer feeds.

xani_ 4y ago

I used that feature very rarely but the times I did it was insanely useful. Mostly running some debug software so debugging session could run locally but I could control it remotely, without installing whole graphical environment and somehow setting up vnc session just to run single app

luckydata 4y ago

It's nothing anyone actually needs.

mgraczyk 4y ago

What percent of Linux users do you think would ever use software this way? What percent of all "desktop" OS users would ever use software this way? It seems like an extremely niche and rare use case and probably not the right thing to target for the main desktop environment. I've been using Linux as my main OS for ~12 years now. I have personally never wanted to do anything like that. For remote software, I would prefer a web UI or a VNC/remote-desktop tool.

dima55 4y ago
X-forwarding (over ssh, or directly like this person is doing) is extremely useful and powerful. I use it this way, and I know plenty of people that do too. On top of that, wayland doesn't solve any problems that I have, so there's your data point.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  Sure, but my guess is that <1% of Linux users currently use X forwarding, and probably <0.01% of desktop OS users would ever want something like this. It's a cool feature that should exist, but rare enough that it doesn't need to be fundamental to desktop architecture.
drdebug 4y ago
Using a wayland desktop, remote login into a Linux server, start a graphical text editor like gvim, it fails. This is a very common way to dev on Linux, I too have been doing this daily, and with ssh+X11 it works out of the box. I wonder what is the best way to do this with Wayland. Should I ask an admin to reconfigure the remote server to run a VNC or RDP server, and then use a specific tool to connect? I wonder if VNC/RDP can integrate apps as windows instead of all-in-one window.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  I do something similar with vim, no gui. I use vim over ssh with tmux. Others I know use vs code with an ssh backend. These two make up the workflow of roughly 60000 Googlers. None of them need X forwarding. Some people may benefit from X forwarding, but the vast majority of Linux users do not.

kelnos 4y ago

I used to use X11's network transparency features a lot in college[0], but it's been a good 20 years and I haven't used it since -- even once. I, too, am not comfortable with throwing away such a potentially useful feature (though I believe there's a wayland "protocol" or something that allows for network transparency now), but I personally don't have a need for it. [0] One of our VLSI design labs was a FreeBSD lab, and the machines there had a bunch of proprietary/paid simulation software on them. It was amazing to be able to ssh in from my dorm room, and run those apps "locally", with access to all my files on the network share. A few of my classmates wondered why I never pulled all-nighters in the lab with them... I never needed to! They all ran Windows at home; back then it was pretty difficult (or at least just kinda unknown) to run an X server on Windows.

galangalalgol 4y ago
I use it quite often. And I am dreading the day the office switches to wayland. I like having terminals open to several machines on the premises and being able to fire up individual applications from each. I don't really like having a workspace devoted to a vnc for each machine. It doesn't work as well. It makes me use the mouse more. I don't want windows into those machines. I want a gui on my machine hooked to the heavy lifting on another. I'm sure I'll adapt. But sonfar, its a productivity killer.

diffeomorphism 4y ago

Considering there is waypipe, what exactly is being "given up"?

kaba0 4y ago

And any program not made with goddamn XMotif will be slow as fuck on anything non-ethernet. It is a strictly worse solution to remote desktoping than what followed it — we are no longer drawing things with CPU and the things we draw are not 3 rectangles. A bitmap crossing the wire for an icon/image/whatever is insanely inefficient through the X protocol, you want to compress it with a modern compression algorithm for much better outcome.

knorker 4y ago

As someone who used to run actual X terminals, diskless purpose built appliances that only ran the X server, I'd say this only really worked on a LAN. It never actually worked "on the road". VNC and windows remote desktop was always better.

tjoff 4y ago

You don't loose anything. Open up gimp remotely on the road, try it. It isn't usable ny any stretch of imagination. That is why we need hacks such as x2go to make it usable. Even the worst RDP solution is orders of magnitude better in performance than X11.

michelb 4y ago

I think that is a great feature. I'd also like to see how often it is used given today's workflows.

pizza234 4y ago

I'd be a big fan if that worked, but I haven't found an open remote desktop solution on Linux that works out of the box and acceptably fast¹, to the point that I have to use proprietary software to perform remote desktop sessions - there is a huge gap between the open solutions and the proprietary ones². ¹=they're all either incredibly slow, or clunky to configure/use. interestingly, X2Go, which I think was working out of the box, but was too slow, is based on an old version of the Nomachine (NX) protocol. ²=the recent RustDesk tries to fill that gap.

arghwhat 4y ago
waypipe[1] is the wayland equivalent people are looking for. It gives you the UX and ease of use of X11 forwarding, but with the performance and efficiency of things like RDP (which is gross, but can run quite well on Windows Server if you throw enough money at Microsoft). Wayland applications will render entirely on the host using host resources and acceleration as needed, buffer content gets transmitted using (hardware accelerated) h264 encoding, while messages in general get passed as-is to give a fully local experience. And it of course works over SSH. 1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

mariusmg 4y ago

>you can use When was the last time you used this feature ? X11 is a protocol designed for machines which didn't have the power to draw a GUI locally. That time has long passed.

lucideer 4y ago

> This is a lot to give up For whom? Nobody is arguing it's not a great and powerful feature, nor that it's not "a lot to give up". The only argument posited is that not a lot of people will actually have to make that sacrifice (as not many actually use that feature). Is that not true?

arghwhat 4y ago

This is a big misunderstanding. Network handling is stripped from the core design, but is very much available on all compositors. The equivalent to X11 forwarding is waypipe[1], which is far superior to X11 forwarding. Rendering happens entirely on the host and clients can therefore use accelerated resources as they wish, and the (accelerated) h264 encoded buffer feeds means much lower network utilization. 1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

_flux 4y ago
Low network utilization yes and perhaps superior to X11 core protocol, but it doesn't come for free, for example in terms of latency. And what if said app was actually a video player in it own self? Then you get to decode the video on server and re-encode it again for transport, whereas a primitive-centric protocol could allow decoding the original video directly on the client. The higher the window size the higher the requirements for the encoder (though Waypipe does say "This way, Waypipe can send only the regions of the buffer that have changed relative to the remote copy.", or is it talking about the video encoder?), whereas with primitive-based systems the requirements are only correlated to the amount of changes done on the display—while still allowing to use image or video encoder for tasks better suitable for it. I just fondly remember the times when (possibly two decades ago) I run xlockmore -mode ifs at work accidentally from my home computer and it was running fine over the 100Mbit network, so I didn't realize my mistake until coming back from lunch. Basically just a bunch of pixels running around smoothly, but I think it would be quite a quality test for a video encoder.. I understand though that coming up with a great protocol for user-interface primitives would be a research project in its own right, however. Perhaps something based on JavaScript, WASM, or EBPF fragments sent to the client would be a realistic options. Time has certainly gone past the primitives provided by X11. But I also think that just "forget about it, we'll video stream it" is just giving up on the problem altogether.
- arghwhat 4y ago
  > Low network utilization yes and perhaps superior to X11 core protocol, but it doesn't come for free, for example in terms of latency. You can have your cake and eat it too: You can disable the compression if it's a problem. It's highly configurable if you want to play with it. The compression means trading a little bit of hardware resources at either end for a better UX (lower latency, higher throughput). > The higher the window size the higher the requirements for the encoder (though Waypipe does say "This way, Waypipe can send only the regions of the buffer that have changed relative to the remote copy.", or is it talking about the video encoder?). The core wayland protocol mandates communicating which parts of a "surface" (read: window) has changed when a new buffer is submitted in a "surface commit". Neither a compositor nor waypipe will do anything if nothing has changed. > I also think that just "forget about it, we'll video stream it" is just giving up on the problem altogether. Each surface has its own stream, and is updated independently. E.g., a video player on a webpage will generally be a subsurface, a context menu or plugin is a popup surface. They're all processed independently, with each their own damage tracking (and if applicable, video compression). If content is stretched or scaled up, only the original source buffer will be transmitted, allowing the display server to take care of this. This is not giving up, this is the maximum effort, optimal implementation. > I just fondly remember the times when (possibly two decades ago) I run ... over a 100Mbit network For reference, a single 4k 60Hz display takes ~15Gb/s to keep fed with bitmaps. Even a quarter of the screen takes 3.7Gb/s. Not even cinematic refresh rates would be able to fit within a 1Gb/s line.

wazoox 4y ago

I use X11 remotely daily (and did so for 25 years). It comes for free with a simple ssh login and doesn't require setting up any server on the remote machine. It just works (even if slowly at times). It beats setting up x2go/VNC/etc hands down.

zitsarethecure 4y ago

X11 is way too slow to run something like gimp remotely, unless perhaps you are sitting near the other machine connected via gigabit ethernet. Giving that up is an easy win for better everything else.

reidacdc 4y ago

It's in the "critical path" for certain niche applications. I do HPC operations, and every now and then, I run across some (usually commercial) scientific software application whose installer and/or configuration manager is a GUI. I am not sitting in front of the cluster head-node, I am ssh'd in to it. With X, I can just go ahead and fire up the GUI, and it will appear. Maybe a bit laggy, but as long as its only one application, it's usually good enough to complete the task I need to complete. With remote work and thin pipes, it's laggier, but "xpra" also allows per-application X forwarding, and removes a lot of the lag. Of course I could set up full VNC and set up a whole desktop environment on the cluster head node, and remote into it, and maybe in the glorious Wayland future, I will have to do that. Sometimes when I talk about this, someone in the comments says that Wayland is working on some kind of per-application forwardability -- that would be nice if it's true. I get that my use-case is niche, and so I don't expect it to be a high priority for the devs, but it's one of those things that, once in a while, is a critical link in my administrative workflow, and I'm not looking forward to the eventual kludging of workarounds. Edited to add: I have now seen the comment below about "waypipe", this sounds very promising!

phkahler 4y ago

>> X client and server are usually the same machine, but they don't have to be. When I was in college there were rooms full of X-terminals which would be used to remote into various bigger workstations. You could also sit locally at one of those machines, but plenty could be done over the network and by more people on lower cost hardware.

thedougd 4y ago

This also gives you the freedom to remote selective applications rather than the whole desktop. X11 remoting took me to a new level in college, when I needed to use Solaris workstations to complete assignments.