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This is what I keep coming back to. A backend that targets Javascript can take advantage of the desktop/laptop GPU. A backend that targets Wayland has to render
by erik_seaberg 4y ago
This is what I keep coming back to. A backend that targets Javascript can take advantage of the desktop/laptop GPU. A backend that targets Wayland has to render everything locally in software (no GPU), and nobody I’ve ever worked for wants to build a system that runs this way.
Xaw and Motif worked okay, and it’s getting hard to imagine a heavy user who has access to only one computer, yet newer GUI toolkits have lost interest in X11 as a platform for remote rendering.
- kaba0 4y agoYou honestly believe that Wayland software are not GPU-accelerated?
- erik_seaberg 4y agoOur datacenters don’t have GPUs, Wayland doesn’t make my desktop’s GPU available to them, and local desktop-only software is getting pretty rare.
- kaba0 4y agoThat sound like a self-made problem. There are waypipe and several other options for using the desktop’s resources.
- erik_seaberg 4y agoI was excited about Waypipe until I read that it has to ship compressed pre-rendered video frames over the wire, and all the desktop can do is decompress and composite them. I believe VNC and RDP are much the same, sending bitmaps rather than structured GPU commands from the app. We could expect everyone to start investing in datacenter GPUs, but architecturally “one GPU per display, plugged directly into the display” always made a lot more sense to me.
- kaba0 4y agoAs mentioned in the thread, X server does the same thing in practice as we are not using XMotif apps anymore with CPU rendering. Icons, textures, all these things will be passed as bitmaps with X remoting, in a strictly worse way than a modern compression could do.