3 ms·

Can you elaborate on this one? You can of course have multiple Wayland displays at once, and/or multiple VNC servers. But, presumably, you're talking about some

by jchw 3y ago

Can you elaborate on this one? You can of course have multiple Wayland displays at once, and/or multiple VNC servers. But, presumably, you're talking about something entirely different here.

JohnFen 3y ago
X lets me log into a machine multiple times simultaneously, with each login having its own, independently operating desktop. Wayland doesn't support this (or didn't the last time I checked). VNC does something entirely different from this -- it just shares an existing desktop remotely rather than providing a unique independent desktop (complete with different resolutions and such, if you like). So the effect is a bit like VNC in that you can remotely access a desktop, but the desktop you see is not a copy of the one being actually displayed on the machine's monitor. It's entirely its own thing, only visible to that particular login.
- jchw 3y ago
  > VNC does something entirely different from this -- it just shares an existing desktop remotely rather than providing a unique independent desktop. Actually, not necessarily; you can use Xvnc to achieve this with X+VNC. It's an X server that serves over VNC. Can Wayland do this? Yes! But, the problem is that there is no singular Wayland "display server". This is both a big strength and big weakness of Wayland. In this case, it means that I can't point to a single correct way you can do this. However, with the compositor I currently use, SwayWM, it's very trivial: I can start Sway inside of an existing compositor or X server to get a nested desktop. You could use this with Waypipe or X11 forwarding for example. It can also be started with wayvnc inside, to expose a VNC server from Sway, though this is not really any different from starting an Xvfb and running a VNC server inside of it.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Can Wayland do this? Yes! Interesting. I remember asking some Wayland devs a few years back about this and they said this use case would never be supported. I'm glad that's changed! It means that if the day comes that I have to use Wayland, I won't necessarily lose functionality. (Just for clarity, I'm not opposed to Wayland if it can do what I want. But I'm not excited by it, either, because the benefits it does provide are ones that don't really matter to me)
    - jchw 3y ago
      Yeah, as you may gather from my first post, I am not advocating anyone to switch if there's nothing in Wayland for them. But at least with wlroots-based compositors (a decent number of them, but notably not GNOME and KDE which use Mutter and Kwin respectively,) you can definitely do this sort of thing relatively easily. It'd probably be a good idea if every compositor got on the same page here so that the experience is consistent. I'm not sure how to do this kind of thing with every compositor.
      - hulitu 3y ago
        Does xv runs in wailand ? xpdf ? fvwm2 ? xterm ? xsnow ? Does wailand supports window managers ?
        jchw 3y ago
        X11 apps run under XWayland, an X server that runs under Wayland compositors, almost always by default. It's possible to run WMs under XWayland too, but most Wayland compositors are WMs and handle the WM for XWayland too. Wayland doesn't have a single display server. Most of what was the X11 display server is moved to the kernel and libraries. So, the WMs ARE the display server. xv, xpdf, xterm should work fine. xsnow should work, but will only see X windows. fvwm2, it can run on some Wayland compositors, but the better option here would be a compatible replacement: as far as I know, we still don't have an fvwm2 equivalent, but SwayWM exists as a replacement for i3, for example.

by jchw 3y ago

Can you elaborate on this one? You can of course have multiple Wayland displays at once, and/or multiple VNC servers. But, presumably, you're talking about something entirely different here.

JohnFen 3y ago

X lets me log into a machine multiple times simultaneously, with each login having its own, independently operating desktop. Wayland doesn't support this (or didn't the last time I checked). VNC does something entirely different from this -- it just shares an existing desktop remotely rather than providing a unique independent desktop (complete with different resolutions and such, if you like). So the effect is a bit like VNC in that you can remotely access a desktop, but the desktop you see is not a copy of the one being actually displayed on the machine's monitor. It's entirely its own thing, only visible to that particular login.

jchw 3y ago
> VNC does something entirely different from this -- it just shares an existing desktop remotely rather than providing a unique independent desktop. Actually, not necessarily; you can use Xvnc to achieve this with X+VNC. It's an X server that serves over VNC. Can Wayland do this? Yes! But, the problem is that there is no singular Wayland "display server". This is both a big strength and big weakness of Wayland. In this case, it means that I can't point to a single correct way you can do this. However, with the compositor I currently use, SwayWM, it's very trivial: I can start Sway inside of an existing compositor or X server to get a nested desktop. You could use this with Waypipe or X11 forwarding for example. It can also be started with wayvnc inside, to expose a VNC server from Sway, though this is not really any different from starting an Xvfb and running a VNC server inside of it.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Can Wayland do this? Yes! Interesting. I remember asking some Wayland devs a few years back about this and they said this use case would never be supported. I'm glad that's changed! It means that if the day comes that I have to use Wayland, I won't necessarily lose functionality. (Just for clarity, I'm not opposed to Wayland if it can do what I want. But I'm not excited by it, either, because the benefits it does provide are ones that don't really matter to me)
  - jchw 3y ago
    Yeah, as you may gather from my first post, I am not advocating anyone to switch if there's nothing in Wayland for them. But at least with wlroots-based compositors (a decent number of them, but notably not GNOME and KDE which use Mutter and Kwin respectively,) you can definitely do this sort of thing relatively easily. It'd probably be a good idea if every compositor got on the same page here so that the experience is consistent. I'm not sure how to do this kind of thing with every compositor.
    - hulitu 3y ago
      Does xv runs in wailand ? xpdf ? fvwm2 ? xterm ? xsnow ? Does wailand supports window managers ?
      - jchw 3y ago
        X11 apps run under XWayland, an X server that runs under Wayland compositors, almost always by default. It's possible to run WMs under XWayland too, but most Wayland compositors are WMs and handle the WM for XWayland too. Wayland doesn't have a single display server. Most of what was the X11 display server is moved to the kernel and libraries. So, the WMs ARE the display server. xv, xpdf, xterm should work fine. xsnow should work, but will only see X windows. fvwm2, it can run on some Wayland compositors, but the better option here would be a compatible replacement: as far as I know, we still don't have an fvwm2 equivalent, but SwayWM exists as a replacement for i3, for example.