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Wayland 1.0 Released, Not Yet Ready To Replace X11
An anonymous reader writes "After being talked about for four years, Wayland 1.0 was released today. The Wayland 1.0 release doesn't mark it yet as being ready for Linux desktop usage but just being API/protocol stable for future expansion. Wayland will now maintain backwards compatibility going forward, but how much longer will it take to replace X11 on the Linux desktop? Quite a while seems likely."
X11 doesn't need replacing, and few need a replacement for X11 for any reason that doesn't boil down to not understanding X11.
Perhaps this is going to be ready when the IPv6 flag day is?
This sig no verb.
Oh, we'll call it 1.0, but I'm sure distros won't start shipping it by default because we said it's not ready. Why are you pulling that face? Worked for KDE didn't it?
I did, at least, skim the article, and I still don't know. Didn't X11 just (as in last few years) get replaced with x.org? This is another replacement already? Ok, before posting, I google and see this:
... [An X server has] a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. ... This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!) Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives. For many things we've been able to keep the X.org server modern by adding extension such as XRandR, XRender and COMPOSITE ... With Wayland we can move the X server and all its legacy technology to an optional code path. Getting to a point where the X server is a compatibility option instead of the core rendering system will take a while, but we'll never get there if [we] don't plan for it.
What's different now is that a lot of infrastructure has moved from the X server into the kernel (memory management, command scheduling, mode setting) or libraries (cairo, pixman, freetype, fontconfig, pango etc) and there is very little left that has to happen in a central server process.
which bored me to tears, so I'm no longer interested, but for those who are....
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
I've used various Linux distros for 13+ years, and have always been disappointed in the horrible desktop graphics. Compared to a Windows machine, a comparable Linux rig is normally a miserable graphics experience. I was shocked the first time I got my hands on a Xoom tablet - the graphics are by FAR one of the best features of the Android platform. I can't for the life of me understand how there can be such an extreme difference between graphics in desktop linux distros compared to the gorgeous and snappy graphics under Android. And I'm not even running garbage graphic cards - one of my machines has a very modern nVidia card that plays all the latest games under Windows, but still handles poorly on Linux. From a technical perspective, I can't understand how there could be such an absurd difference, other than that the Android kernel is a fork, and clearly the Android kernel developers are far more concerned about creating a pleasant and useful graphical experience?
Imagine recreating xlib so it doesn't communicate with an X server but directly draws things on the local screen, maybe in a multithreaded fashion. In such a scenario, the ability to share a display between many programs would be lost or alternatively a badly behaviored program could disrupt the other's windows. What kind of increased performance would be obtained (if any) by replacing IPC, as used in X11 (and in wayland too?) for drawing and use in process fonctions instead?
Try never. Yes, I know that it should be possible to write a Wayland client that provides X11 server capability, but in that case, it is the Wayland client that is replacing X11, not Wayland.
Seriously, though, the Wayland effort appears to be throwing out every advantage the X11 display had over the Windows display for a replacement that will probably never be quite as good as a Windows. I just hope that developers of programs which currently support X11 continue to support X11, or my life will get much more difficult. In fact, for much of what I do, without X11 support (and only Wayland display supported), I would probably be better off with a Windows desktop instead of a Linux desktop.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
He already said years ago that he intends for Ubuntu to use it as soon as it is ready. I expect Ubuntu will likely be the first major distro to do so.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Yep, the issue with constantly pushing forwards and looking for the next new thing means that you can periodically make a bad choice. Shuttleworth, while some of his descisions haven't been the best, has been instrumental in pushing the Linux desktop to where it is today. Linux has never enjoyed so many desktop users. That brings good and bad, but its still an overall positive.
When you consider how fast the switch to x.org from xfree86 took place in three Linux world, any clearly superior x-like implementation with fully compatible APIs and without unacceptable license encumbrances could be adopted in very short order. If the functionality requires every program and every library to be reworked, then it will probably never happen.
Not having ANY real Wayland knowledge, I can only hope it is not another change in Linux for change's sake.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The important feature about X Windows was Network Transparency - You could run an application on one computer with its screen output and keyboard and mouse input on a different computer. Sure, there are other ways to do it - lots of ssh sessions, or web browsing (especially with AJAX etc.), or competing window systems like NeWS, or screen emulators like VNC and Windows Remote Desktop - but fundamentally it's a lot cleaner to have some kind of network-transparent window system than to have an application need to drive a "screen" on its own machine.
25 years later, do we still need this? Yes! Virtual machines are taking over the computer business, so you can't expect the application to be running on your desktop (even if it _is_ running in a VM on top of your desktop), screens are a wide range of different sizes and capabilities (laptops, tablets, big monitors, etc., which often don't resemble the machine the app is running on), web browsers are getting used in increasingly complex ways because Windows didn't have a convenient X interface, and there's more and more ugliness around, and more waste of resources trying to emulate things that X did adequately well.
There are lots of good reasons to replace X, but Network Transparency is still the core feature, even if you want the application to have more control over the screen and its associated hardware than we had back in the 1980s, or if you want to move processing functions to different points between the client and the server (e.g. NeWS and NeXT's Display Postscript did some things differently, and Plan 9 and its successors had their own opinions about how to implement everything), but if Wayland doesn't offer Network Transparency yet, it's not an adequate X replacement.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
M.any years ago they were talking about Enlightenment wanting to replace X11
While E has gone to E17(still beta), it's not replacing X11 yet.
I dunno much about the project that's the topic of TFA, so I won't know how successful it would be in replacing X11
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So.. X11 needs to be replaced with something shiny because of...? Seems the response most often stated is the code base is a mess. Why not just clean that up instead? And has others have noted here, remote usage is still important and no, VNC is not the same thing.
...network abstraction layers to their GUIs, specifically to enable people to mirror and share their desktops efficiently.
The mundane, non-vertically integrated *nix world still doesn't have this ability after all these years. X11 can't mirror/share, its also laggy over broadband connections, VNC is primitive and slow, etc. The NoMachine people have claimed they can support screen sharing in NX, but I haven't seen a working example yet (and those features are in the proprietary version anyway); otherwise they did a good job of making X11 usably network transparent for use cases not contained within a single LAN (i.e. most situations).
Personally, I'm tired of seeing all the hand-waving about X11's network transparency. It doesn't help in the vast majority of instances where people want to share an app or screen during a teleconference. X11 is not advanced in this respect -- just sadly out of touch. It mainly addresses the rather outdated use case where you have a handful of engineer types who open a CLI and type an ssh command, possibly fiddle with the display variable, then type in the desired app as a command so they can run one expensive, customized app on a server in a specially cooled room 3 floors down.
Remote X is a pig once ping times increase due to the number of round trips required. VNC is far superior in that situation especially when it can be notified of changes efficiently.
Those that are work on the X11 client...
The failure to understand history dooms them to repeat history, and reimplement things yet again... poorly.
In a word, money.
Desktop Linux generates very little on its own. Red Hat manages to rake in about a billion dollars in revenue, but Canonical only manages $30 million (wikipedia). Android doesn't have to make money per se as it has other avenues of monetization (e.g. advertising). It also lives or dies by its UI.
You can also contrast this to the embedded Linux, server, and HPC markets, for which I don't have numbers, but Linux has a dominant position.
Linux is more often optimized for workflow than graphics. The former is generally excellent and highly configurable. While Linux advocates like to tout the number of individual contributors to the kernel, a large number of these are corporate contributors wishing for anonymity. There's not a lot of ROI in shiny buttons. Also, low-end graphics run on more platforms.
That said, I like the way my desktop looks (earth image with weather and sunlight, updates every 1/2 hour). Dunno what you object to with yours, but it can probably be remedied if you have some free time.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
To anyone who complains about not using network transparency of X server, I do use all the time and I do need it. And so do thousands of system administrators and power users.
I hope Wayland has some kind of network transparency support. It doesn't have to be X protocol, it could be something new and improved, but there must be a network transparency support.
--Coder
It seems to me that there's nothing to gain by this. You say that nobody renders like this any more, but I believe you're talking about network transparency. Most detractors of X11 do. But this doesn't seem to be any problem at all.
Look at WoW. Runs faster on Linux than on Windows.
The renderer can't be bad, can it. The mapping of API to game has to be pretty good to manage that, especially since it was written for a different renderer (if, indeed, your proposition about "nobody does it this way" is right) and a different OS.
It seems that still people are looking at X11, seeing network transparency and going "Oh, it HAS to be going slow if it can render over the network!".
If Weyland implements X11 then you're not going to get rid of any of the code that they complain is never going to get used, so no gain there. And if the code is never going to get used, it doesn't slow anything down.
Really. Don't accept received wisdom on this, but have a look.
It doesn't seem to suck for local display. WoW runs faster on Linux than Windows, so the display can't be crippling it, can it. Compiz did more than Vista on desktop animations earlier and with less hardware, so the display can't be crippling it, can it.
People assert X11 sucks for local. But I believe they just think that the display is a zero-sum game, so if it works well over the network, it must work poorly locally.
I do not believe this to be the case.
VNC is one to one, but with X you can have a pile of windows open from a pile of hosts. It may not be important to many here but it's the entire reason why my workplace has linux on the desktop machines and why the MS windows machines all have X as well.
The funny thing is despite all the "cloud" hype people are forgetting one of the major advantages of being able to use the resources of more than one computer via networking. VNC is the dumb terminal approach, which is fine for many tasks, but it has limitations.
The article keeps saying Linux.. I'm a bit worried about compatibility with other systems such as BSD. And even Windows, will there be Wayland servers for Windows just like there's a couple of X servers now? Maybe we'll still use X for the networked stuff, and Linux will be just like Windows and Mac, with a compatibility layer to display X11 applications.
X11 is a bottleneck in Unix security. It is not safe to run applications from multiple users on the same desktop if you require isolation between them. The applications can listen in on the keystrokes and (I think) read the content of the other applications' windows. Desktop OSes are in some sense trying to catch up to mobile OSes when it comes to application-level sandboxing, so this isolation an important feature.
It would be extremely exciting if Wayland had a sane isolation model, either based on SELinux or on standard user accounts. I wouldn't have to look at things like Qubes OS (which admittedly is much more secure than my Fedora will ever be). I did RTFA and browsed some of the links, and there is no mention of it, so I'm not holding my breath.
That's effectively what's happening with Android, but I think it's a bit of a backward step since it throws away most of the applications that are the reason I use linux in the first place, at least for the moment. Also Win2k/XP and OS X showed that people really want to run a server OS on their computers anyway instead of a cut down piece of crap like Win95/ME.
For all the crowing about network transparency, it is not the killer feature to most. In terms of network management MS's RDP easily wins out. Reason is that it works well and supports low bandwidth situations very well since it isn't just a pixel-based protocol. However for ease of use and cross platform goodness, nothing beats VNC. That's what our Linux guru uses, in the situations where a command line isn't enough, not remote X.
Frankly, given the difference between local interconnects and network speed, I don't think network transparency is the kind of thing to worry about. Rather, make a good local display system, and then add the ability to serve it out over the network through whatever means are appropriate, much like Windows does with RDP. The focus should be on good local display, as that is really what matters.
X11 is a dinosaur and a millstone around the neck of Linux. Huge chunks of it are completely obsolete and what remains is just a bottleneck and extra context switches to drag down performance. The sooner it is dumped the better for Linux. People who really want remote desktops can run X11 as a client over Wayland though eventually Wayland will get a remote protocol which will do away with that requirement too.
Is it possible to test it right now? If so, what is the easiest way? I would try it on VM.
Like Martin, I'm worried about Client Side Decorations:
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2010/05/open-letter-the-issues-with-client-side-window-decorations/
I'm worried as I'm not sure they've done anything to address this. I'm certain I will not be touching it unless the window manager can be set to be the one drawing them.
The entire point is that it doesn't. Pure 1980s single user without a network mentality. The bits you've seen about networking here are speculation about adding an external screen scraper in response to people complaining about the single user without a network mentality. It's not an answer, it's just fobbing off the question with a hope that somebody else will do something about it.
It's not a speedboat, it's a harbour wall with graffiti on it. They are hoping that somebody else will take a photo of the graffiti, put it on their speedboat, and then deliver it somewhere else. However nobody has the camera or the speedboat yet. It may not be that hard to do, I don't know, but it's a non-answer because nobody has done that for Wayland yet or even started trying.
The two main complaints I see discussed here appear to derive from some fundamental misunderstandings about what Wayland is.
Wayland is a Protocol and an optional helper library to implementing that protocol. This protocol says nothing about net work transparency, in both the sense of enabling or prohibiting it. It also says nothing about client decorations. The key points here is not to make a decision for or against any particular technology or methodology and then be stuck with that decision for the next 20 years, like we are with X.
How or if, either of these work is all down to the compositor. The reference compositor 'Weston' does not do network transparency and leaves window decoration to the client or its toolkit. However none of the big desktops, i.e end users, will be using this compositor. For example KDE will continue to use Kwin as their wayland compositor, and KDE have already clearly said that Kwin will be decorating their windows and not the clients!
As to network transparency, all windows are drawn to their own back buffers, and where these buffers will be eventually displayed is also the choice of the compositor, and it might well just decided to send them over a network connection. e.g. like what VNC does.
I think if you base your opinion on what other people say, including me, then maybe you shouldn't comment? All of this is discussed first hand on the Wayland web site and/or mailing list.
Unfortunately since I've posted a bit late, I doubt many will read this...
xpra does what you want.
sysadmin using a gui? thats strange... may be u should turn to ms windows
You had me agreeing with your assessment, right up until you mentioned VNC as a successor.
Let me be clear. VNC BLOWS GOATS! It is an epic steaming pile of you know what. It is NOT a suitable replacement for any remote desktop based system. Not even X and network transparency.
On a somewhat tangential note: I find it interesting how things have changed over the past few years, not just in the X or Linux world, but in the computer industry at large. Not that long ago, people were hugely excited about changes and improvements. They were eager to get their hands on the new version of whatever and couldn't wait for upcoming features. There were lines for new versions of Windows and most people ran the latest beta of whatever Linux distro they liked. Fast forward to today, and it seems like we are stuck in a loop of "re-invention" where applications and desktops are continually made over for the sake of "improvement" and it is met with howls of protest from the user base.
People are tired of; 'we decided to re-engineer from scratch because we didn't have anything better to do and think our way(or $newLanguage) is better. Along the way we lost a boat load of functionality, but don't worry we plan to reach feature parity within the next four to ten years. Perhaps Wayland and others would be better off if they advertised what new benefit they will bring. If it is something that people actually want they will gravitate to it.
Unfortunately, the developers of these projects typically lose interest in less than those four years and the cycle of diminishing returns continues.
Almost everythings I read here about X11 is its
Network Transparency ??
WTF I have to do with
Network Transparency ??
as a user of KDE/Gnome/ on my own LOCAL COMPUTER AT HOME or even at my office ????
Because my admin guy needs to have
Network Transparency ??
Or because my only own ONE computer at home do need
Network Transparency ??
for no reasons ???
X11 IS a FU&^%ing 30 years old crawling beast!
So even if I do have 2,3,4 computers at home, those will be one or two linux, one Apple Mac/iOS, and the others will certainly be Windows 7/8, and Wii, Playstation, XBox, etc...
As a linux user, I DO WANT to have local and native 2D/OpenGL performances of my 200-600$ worthy graphics card(s) that is NOT obscured behind layers and layers of [client/server] "protocols" and Network Transparency
DOT.
Can I have a remote Wayland session over ssh, like I do with X? No? Then no, it's not going to replace X in an industrial-grade environment.
Finding God in a Dog
The one significant missing piece of this puzzle is network transparency, it doesn't look like the Wayland code is credible at this stage (not even the unreleased hacks), and before someone mentions NX or VNC, let me remind you that these technologies were designed in the 90s and 80s respectively - they *were* great. xpra is where it's at. Video encoding, and h264 in particular, has made great strides in the last few years, which means that you can now get both a high compression ratio and high quality. Try it, it's awesome. (and as with NX and VNC, you don't lose your session when the network drops)
I thought people needed memory management, window management, font management, text rendering capability, graphics drawing, backing store, OpenGL, composited desktops, the ability to sync sound and video, stuff like that. You must mean that network transparency is the one feature that sets X apart.
In fact it's the only part of X that's still relevant. KMS, DRI, cairo, pango, GTK or QT, Gnome or KDE libs etc have taken over almost every part of X. Wayland simply acknowledges this and aims for simplicity by allowing those other parts of a modern system to do their jobs and doing little else. Networked display will show up at some point via some method that's better than VNC too.
You're not thinking of the Berlin Consortium or something are you? I think they changed their name to something catchier later, but it escapes me
That was Fresco. It died sometime in 2004.
No, Wayland is throwing out ALL X11 compatibility
As long as there's a widely available, free X11 server that sits on top of Wayland, compatibility isn't thrown out. And seeing as X.Org X11 and Wayland share a lot of developers, I fully anticipate that such a server will be maintained. From the FAQ: "we now run [X11 applications] under a root-less X server that is itself a client of the Wayland server. [...] With Wayland we can move the X server and all its legacy technology to a optional code path." Do you fear that this code path will bit-rot due to lack of test coverage as GUI toolkits are ported to Wayland and desktop Linux distributions make the switch?
Wayland is still linux centric! UDEV is required.. why?
Wayland needs to run on other unix like operating systems or it's useless. If you want to replace X, it needs to run most of the places X ran!
I can't for the life of me imagine that it's actually efficient to have a bunch of fancy animations and shadows and transparency and 3D effects
These effects help the user see how the various things displayed on the screen relate to one another. Shadows, for example, indicate to the user that a particular element is on top of another in the stack, which is why Mac OS has been doing some sort of shadow (even if faked through the shape of the window frame) since 1984. Animations of window A going into or out of icon B, such as a folder window coming out of an opened folder icon or a window minimizing down to a taskbar icon, indicate that the object represented by B is the parent to the object represented by A.
Valve: L4D2 runs 20% faster on Ubuntu than Windows 7
http://www.techspot.com/news/49630-valve-l4d2-runs-20-faster-on-ubuntu-than-windows-7.html
Wayland's 'market' will be adjusted to its capabilities
sooner than vice versa. Today's paradigm.
In truth, "Not yet ready" will be its middle name.
(Subject says it all.)
--libman
"Sure vnc or rdp can do this sort of thing, but not at an app (really per window) basis." - by caseih (160668) on Tuesday October 23, @01:47AM (#41737971)
Ah, but Full-Blown Citrix can...
(Since, "come right down to it"? It's only a modded version of Windows Server really, & has ALL SORTS of "per window" + "per application" possibilities...)
APK
P.S.=> It's STILL better than "stock Windows" imo @ least... apk
Per my other post, regarding Citrix -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3202975&cid=41743157 , you can also "rig up" Services for UNIX (by MS, purchased from the OpenNT system by Softway Systems) and its X server...
See here -> http://www.softpanorama.net/Unixification/index.shtml
and then here -> http://www.softpanorama.net/Unixification/SFU/index.shtml
(Especially the latter, considering the "pertinent quote/excerpt" from it I quote next below)
"SFU environment provides the most important Unix features including pipes, hard file links, symbolic file links, networking services, and X11 graphical support through the X Window System."
APK
P.S.=> I used to mess around with OpenNT when it came out & was still NOT owned/bought-out by MS & remember doing things like this using it, or Cygwin tools (or even "straight-ports" of *NIX apps to Win32 API stuff)... apk
The Wayland team is working with KDE and Gnome who are going to implement something like RDB for their respective GUIs. That's going to be how networking is going to be handled at the GUI level.
I'd personally love to see a patchable universal event subsystem that flexibly combines keyboards, mice, MIDI and suchlike so that any device can be patched to control desired features of whatever application you want to.
The important thing about X is very precisely the fact that it's a client-server protocol with network transparency, so the client app doesn't need to be on the same machine as the display server. When I was a sysadmin supporting a bunch of machines, the ability to have lots of windows on my screen that were running clients on lots of different hosts was really valuable, and now that I'm running VMware, I'd be a lot happier if I could do the same thing instead of running a lot of ssh logins and the VMware console widget. It's a bit less critical than it used to be, because lots of the "remote desktop" functionality is built into browsers now, but the tradeoff is big ugly browsers that crash a lot, burn gigabytes of RAM, and aren't very fast.
There are other windowing protocols that also do this (for instance, NeWS, which renders things in Postscript, so what you see is not only what you get, but it's also what you want, and it supports downloading functions to the server so you can avoid round-trips during mouse motion, etc.), but the network transparency is the big win. Running NeWS on an 8MB Sun-3/50 was quite nice, even though these days I've got wristwatches with more horsepower.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So just this morning I had to reboot my Win7 machine, because I had an RDP session that wouldn't die. Was it because I hibernated the machine to bring it in to the office, disconnecting the VPN in the process? I don't know, but the "Are you sure you really want to close the window, we'll save the session for you, is that ok?" dialog box wouldn't go away and wanted to be on top.
Win7 really is a lot better than XP, and XP was a lot better than 95/SE/ME were, but I still have to reboot it a couple of times a month. And stuff doesn't die for no good reason anywhere near as often as it used to (except Firefox, but our work IT department insists on using older versions with long-term support :-) (And at least Firefox saves its sessions relatively cleanly when it dies, unlike IE8.) And since I'm sometimes using an external monitor as well as the laptop screen, when I'm just on the laptop, sometimes there will be windows I can't open because they're on the Other Screen. If I were using X, these things wouldn't be problems.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My normal work environment is a Win7 laptop, either on a 10 Mbps LAN at work or VPN from home, with Windows Remote Desktop Protocol connection through a firewall to a Win2008 server (currently running on VMware ESXi), which runs browsers and putty SSH connections to a variety of other machines in my lab. For the things it does, it mostly works ok. Cut&paste works pretty well, remote disk mounting is possible though I don't use it much, web pages with no sound and not too much movement render ok. Watching Youtube with sound on fails badly - way too jerky and painfully out of sync. Youtube with the sound off redraws the pictures better, but especially full-screen you can see the redraws happening on the LAN, and worse remotely. Traffic webcams do fine, network performance graphers do fine. On a LAN, it's better than running Motif on a 386/33 was (ok, it's better than that, because I've got a 1920x1080 32-bit screen instead of a 640x480 8-bit screen... but considering that I've got a few thousand times more horsepower now, it ought to be enough better to be extremely transparent.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So if I want to have my desktop connected to a few dozen target machines using RDP, how do you suggest I do it? Keep a few dozen RDP login windows active? Clunky! At that point I might as well just run a few dozen ssh sessions, or stick to browser-based management applications. RDP is fine if I want to talk to one machine at a time (and in fact my Windows desktop usually has an RDP session to a Windows server on my lab network, which has a few dozen ssh and browser sessions open running management applications, because they're mostly on target machines that don't run X.)
(And if all your foes are spelling or grammar Nazis, that means you only make enemies of intelligent people, which _is_ a step up from the kinds of enemies lots of people have, I suppose....)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You've got it backwards - if I wanted Linux to be purely a server OS, I'd be fine with administering it over ssh with an occasional https light-GUI tool. With Linux on a desktop running an X window server, I can also run graphical applications on other not-purely-server Linux machines. Also, as VMware and its competitors in the dedicated and cloud businesses are proliferating, more and more things are becoming servers (even my laptop, which often has multiple VMware clients running.)
It would be nice if X had evolved a bit more than it has, but simply running it on machines that are thousands of times more powerful than the Sun 3/50 and 386/33 I first used for X windows in the 1980s really is a good start.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Try doing that same workload with X11 and see how it compares.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
BSD currently has no plans to support Wayland, and usually takes a while before catching up (unless it's a standard like IPv6). That said, the guys who do PC-BSD could strive to make Wayland at least an option on PC-BSD 10. Other BSD server based platforms, like FreeBSD, OpenBSD may continue to rely on either X or the plain CLI, but PC-BSD is one BSD platform that could make good use of Wayland.
RDP is good, I agree - I hate to admit it - but there are also limitations (cost and setup..)
VNC is just plain outdated (1980s technology)
NX is now closed source and the last open source version is unmaintained
Xpra is the new kid on the block (the xpra.org version) - from your comments, it sounds like you should try it
On *nix, only the last 2 support seamless mode. (RDP could do it but is too much work to setup)
Disclaimer: xpra.org maintainer
TODO: 753) write sig.
xpra.org may be worth a try. Although it is not a "remote desktop" solution but a seamless remote application solution.
TODO: 753) write sig.
It is certainly possible, but easy it is not.
The latest instructions on how to get seamless RDP to work with Linux are well out of date and never worked reliably or properly for me...
TODO: 753) write sig.