4 ms·

What I want to see: * Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL * Drop dependency on GTK (it's a source of many problems) and just implement their own full f

by shmerl 1y ago

What I want to see: * Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL * Drop dependency on GTK (it's a source of many problems) and just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling like Wine is doing. * Back Servo again as the future engine.

GuB-42 1y ago
> Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL How much of a difference does it make? > just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine) > Back Servo again as the future engine 100% yes, if they still can that is
- shmerl 1y ago
  Vulkan is the modern option, the difference is not being stuck with legacy paths and using something that allows explicit sync. Wayland is also the modern option, so I don't really worry about X11 use cases. For remote desktops, better to use something like FreeRDP anyway. X11 forwarding is much worse in every sense. I think KDE are working on integrating FreeRDP server into Plasma for seamless usage. Another thing to add for Firefox would be may be switching to Vulkan video from VAAPI (or at least having it as an option since ffmpeg already supports it) and using hardware acceleration for video encoding too, not just for video decoding.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    X11 can also do remote window forwarding, not just desktops which is super handy. Your windows appear in the remote computer with its own window manager just like you run them locally. One of the reasons I still use X.
    - shmerl 1y ago
      For barebones window forwarding (no input) I use something like gpu-screen-recorder with SRT streaming output and play the result on the other end with mpv / ffplay. Haven't looked into it, but FreeRDP might support specific window forwarding too rather than the whole desktop. If you need something fancier there is Sunshine / Moonlight, but they still have an issue with not using Pipewire for window / screen capturing (and kmsgrab is not really the proper way to do it). Anyway, X11 is a complete dead end in general so it's not really a viable option for anything serious.
      - GuB-42 1y ago
        These look like kludges more than anything. X11 may be a dead end but Wayland sucks as a replacement, so for now, I see no other option than supporting them both. It may be technically possible to do the equivalent do X11 forwarding with Wayland, that is connecting to a server with a ssh terminal (no remote desktop, headless server), run a GUI app, and have it display its windows on my own desktop as if it was running locally. The problem is that Wayland is 17 years old and I still can't.
        shmerl 1y ago
        FreeRDP is pretty feature rich, so I wouldn't call it a kludge. For any kind decent remote desktop access you need good performance, specifically low latency. X11 just isn't there. Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless. Instead of X server you can have any Wayland compositor (Wayland server) and whatever part that provides streaming (FreeRDP or what not). So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
        badc0ffee 1y ago
        Look into NX. I used some kind of free NX package with Ubuntu about 10 years ago and it was about as fast as RDP.
        shmerl 1y ago
        Yeah, I've seen it in action (nomachine/nx) It's not bad. But problem is that it's not open source, so it's sort of DOA, unlike all the open options. They should have opened it from the start for it to be relevant.
        wkat4242 1y ago
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  > As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine) Look into xpra
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine Isn't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to cover that?
  - aorth 1y ago
    > Isn't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to cover that? The correct repository for Waypipe is https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe, but yes it does what you said and works well.
danudey 1y ago
Would love if FF could support VA-API decoding + Wayland + GPU acceleration on Ubuntu by default, rather than having to follow a possibly outdated Arch linux guide to hack it into working at least some of the time.
- shmerl 1y ago
  I'm not using Ubuntu, but any recent version of Firefox supports VAAPI by default for quite some time already. So may be check your version or check what Ubuntu is doing wrong / use something else. What I want to see is VAAPI encoding used, not just decoding. Better even Vulkan video both for decoding and encoding.

by shmerl 1y ago

GuB-42 1y ago

> Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL How much of a difference does it make? > just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine) > Back Servo again as the future engine 100% yes, if they still can that is

shmerl 1y ago
Vulkan is the modern option, the difference is not being stuck with legacy paths and using something that allows explicit sync. Wayland is also the modern option, so I don't really worry about X11 use cases. For remote desktops, better to use something like FreeRDP anyway. X11 forwarding is much worse in every sense. I think KDE are working on integrating FreeRDP server into Plasma for seamless usage. Another thing to add for Firefox would be may be switching to Vulkan video from VAAPI (or at least having it as an option since ffmpeg already supports it) and using hardware acceleration for video encoding too, not just for video decoding.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  X11 can also do remote window forwarding, not just desktops which is super handy. Your windows appear in the remote computer with its own window manager just like you run them locally. One of the reasons I still use X.
  - shmerl 1y ago
    For barebones window forwarding (no input) I use something like gpu-screen-recorder with SRT streaming output and play the result on the other end with mpv / ffplay. Haven't looked into it, but FreeRDP might support specific window forwarding too rather than the whole desktop. If you need something fancier there is Sunshine / Moonlight, but they still have an issue with not using Pipewire for window / screen capturing (and kmsgrab is not really the proper way to do it). Anyway, X11 is a complete dead end in general so it's not really a viable option for anything serious.
    - GuB-42 1y ago
      These look like kludges more than anything. X11 may be a dead end but Wayland sucks as a replacement, so for now, I see no other option than supporting them both. It may be technically possible to do the equivalent do X11 forwarding with Wayland, that is connecting to a server with a ssh terminal (no remote desktop, headless server), run a GUI app, and have it display its windows on my own desktop as if it was running locally. The problem is that Wayland is 17 years old and I still can't.
      - shmerl 1y ago
        FreeRDP is pretty feature rich, so I wouldn't call it a kludge. For any kind decent remote desktop access you need good performance, specifically low latency. X11 just isn't there. Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless. Instead of X server you can have any Wayland compositor (Wayland server) and whatever part that provides streaming (FreeRDP or what not). So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
        badc0ffee 1y ago
        Look into NX. I used some kind of free NX package with Ubuntu about 10 years ago and it was about as fast as RDP.
        shmerl 1y ago
        Yeah, I've seen it in action (nomachine/nx) It's not bad. But problem is that it's not open source, so it's sort of DOA, unlike all the open options. They should have opened it from the start for it to be relevant.
        wkat4242 1y ago
heavyset_go 1y ago
> As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine) Look into xpra
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine Isn't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to cover that?
- aorth 1y ago
  > Isn't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to cover that? The correct repository for Waypipe is https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe, but yes it does what you said and works well.

danudey 1y ago

Would love if FF could support VA-API decoding + Wayland + GPU acceleration on Ubuntu by default, rather than having to follow a possibly outdated Arch linux guide to hack it into working at least some of the time.

shmerl 1y ago
I'm not using Ubuntu, but any recent version of Firefox supports VAAPI by default for quite some time already. So may be check your version or check what Ubuntu is doing wrong / use something else. What I want to see is VAAPI encoding used, not just decoding. Better even Vulkan video both for decoding and encoding.