5 ms·

I get it about Wayland. Most of X is legacy cruft and even isolating that into XWayland or whatever it's called for backwards compatibility is better than havi

I get it about Wayland. Most of X is legacy cruft and even isolating that into XWayland or whatever it's called for backwards compatibility is better than having it front and center. But yes, there are use cases it doesn't cover. Example. My elderly mom uses Linux laptops that I've rigged to (1) always have an SSH connection open to my server machine, with reverse tunnels, and (2) run x0vncserver. Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing. Where is the equivalent for Wayland? I get the impression that "it shouldn't exist because security" and therefore won't. Luckily, the show's not over yet. I run Fedora. The main spin won't do it any more, but the MATE spin is perfect. It comes up in MATE and it uses X! Still happy. Other laptop installations I have running probably use Wayland and as long as nothing breaks, I don't care.

sudobash1 1y ago
This is true with more "modern" setups. I tried rustdesk with Wayland. It somewhat works, but you have to be present at the "remote" PC to click a button allowing the sharing. I periodically retry Wayland, and it does seem to be improving, albeit slowly. There are a few significant things that just aren't there, but mostly it feels like death by a thousand paper-cuts. I can't dock toolbars; I can't use xdotools; screenshares are flaky; I can't click and drag to upload to browsers. I could live with Wayland, but the experience is still superior (for my use-cases) with X11.
- markasoftware 1y ago
  rustdesk is a little sketchy https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/14kjvkg/community_consensus_on_rustdesk_with_all_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/14kjvkg/communi...
treve 1y ago
Does Waypipe solve this problem?
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  Unlikely; AFAIK waypipe solves "run this program on a remote machine but display it locally" (roughly like X forwarding), not "show me the remote display" (roughly like x11vnc) which is better covered by wayvnc or assorted per-DE solutions.
c-hendricks 1y ago
KDE and Gnome each have their own Wayland compatible RDP servers. It's annoying it's not as convenient as older X vnc servers, but it's not impossible. For wlroots systems there's wayvnc.
- lcnielsen 1y ago
  The problem with those are the iffy headless support. For Gnome it kind of works as long as you don't run into keyring issues (you will, the credentials management for gnome-remote-desktop is terrible compared to eg xrdp), don't need more than 1 desktop per user (you might need to support this for eg HPC, though there are workarounds), and you don't try to do hardware acceleration, headless, Wayland and Xwayland at the same time (which is a Mutter capabilities bug I have raised with them). For KDE headless Wayland just doesn't work. Unfortunately they are only considering a narrow range of usecases, this has kind of always been the case since the whole "1 graphical session per user" thing, which doesn't map to a lot of use cases (though you can work around it it's very unintuitive). I hope the XFCE devs can come up with something and that we can get good RDP support for that at least.
ranger_danger 1y ago
https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/56 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/56
anon-3988 1y ago
If you already don't care about security, whats stopping you from running 10 year old software and never updating it? Its not like Wayland is going to ruin your older software and hardware. I don't get why its such a big deal that software that: 1. no one wants to develop 2. is completely free 3. no longer being developed is such a problem, its free. if its so important to you, why not contribute yourself? Should these people be forced to contribute to projects that they want to be free of against their will?
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  I think laziness is the most common reason. They want their distro/WM/DE/apps/etc. to not drop Xorg so that they can continue using their system the way they want. And if push came to shove, they'd probably just live without it if they couldn't keep being lazy about it.
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> But yes, there are use cases it doesn't cover. Example. My elderly mom uses Linux laptops that I've rigged to (1) always have an SSH connection open to my server machine, with reverse tunnels, and (2) run x0vncserver. > Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing. I'm not sure why anyone would mind the security of that setup? Provided that your server isn't compromised, that arrangement should provide both confidentiality and integrity, and if SSH is compromised then we all have bigger problems.

sudobash1 1y ago

This is true with more "modern" setups. I tried rustdesk with Wayland. It somewhat works, but you have to be present at the "remote" PC to click a button allowing the sharing. I periodically retry Wayland, and it does seem to be improving, albeit slowly. There are a few significant things that just aren't there, but mostly it feels like death by a thousand paper-cuts. I can't dock toolbars; I can't use xdotools; screenshares are flaky; I can't click and drag to upload to browsers. I could live with Wayland, but the experience is still superior (for my use-cases) with X11.

markasoftware 1y ago
rustdesk is a little sketchy https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/14kjvkg/community_consensus_on_rustdesk_with_all_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/14kjvkg/communi...

treve 1y ago

Does Waypipe solve this problem?

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
Unlikely; AFAIK waypipe solves "run this program on a remote machine but display it locally" (roughly like X forwarding), not "show me the remote display" (roughly like x11vnc) which is better covered by wayvnc or assorted per-DE solutions.

c-hendricks 1y ago

KDE and Gnome each have their own Wayland compatible RDP servers. It's annoying it's not as convenient as older X vnc servers, but it's not impossible. For wlroots systems there's wayvnc.

lcnielsen 1y ago
The problem with those are the iffy headless support. For Gnome it kind of works as long as you don't run into keyring issues (you will, the credentials management for gnome-remote-desktop is terrible compared to eg xrdp), don't need more than 1 desktop per user (you might need to support this for eg HPC, though there are workarounds), and you don't try to do hardware acceleration, headless, Wayland and Xwayland at the same time (which is a Mutter capabilities bug I have raised with them). For KDE headless Wayland just doesn't work. Unfortunately they are only considering a narrow range of usecases, this has kind of always been the case since the whole "1 graphical session per user" thing, which doesn't map to a lot of use cases (though you can work around it it's very unintuitive). I hope the XFCE devs can come up with something and that we can get good RDP support for that at least.

ranger_danger 1y ago

https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/56 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/56

anon-3988 1y ago

If you already don't care about security, whats stopping you from running 10 year old software and never updating it? Its not like Wayland is going to ruin your older software and hardware. I don't get why its such a big deal that software that: 1. no one wants to develop 2. is completely free 3. no longer being developed is such a problem, its free. if its so important to you, why not contribute yourself? Should these people be forced to contribute to projects that they want to be free of against their will?

ranger_danger 1y ago
I think laziness is the most common reason. They want their distro/WM/DE/apps/etc. to not drop Xorg so that they can continue using their system the way they want. And if push came to shove, they'd probably just live without it if they couldn't keep being lazy about it.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago

> But yes, there are use cases it doesn't cover. Example. My elderly mom uses Linux laptops that I've rigged to (1) always have an SSH connection open to my server machine, with reverse tunnels, and (2) run x0vncserver. > Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing. I'm not sure why anyone would mind the security of that setup? Provided that your server isn't compromised, that arrangement should provide both confidentiality and integrity, and if SSH is compromised then we all have bigger problems.