Remote Desktop Backend Merged into Wayland

New submitter Skrapion writes "One month ago, an independent developer submitted patches to the Wayland's Weston compositor which adds support for FreeRDP, an open-source remote desktop protocol. Now, after six revisions, the remote desktop code has been merged into the trunk. While remote desktop has been prototyped in Weston once before by Wayland developer Kristian Høgsberg, this is the first time Wayland/Weston has officially supported the feature. For a summary of why we can expect Wayland's remote desktop to surpass X.Org's network transparency, see Daniel Stone's excellent talk from Linux.conf.au."

Comments

And why is this better than VNC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why show we care about freeRDP?

Re:And why is this better than VNC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably RDP can handle rootless windows. VNC does not have that option at this moment. That means that RDP will work much like xforwarding and be usable over ssh, whereas with VNC you need to start a VNC-session and click around on the desktop to start programs.

Re:And why is this better than VNC?

[LordLimecat]

Because VNC is slow and sucks.

Re:And why is this better than VNC?

[0racle]

RDP on windows at least outperforms VNC by a wide margin both on fast and slow network connections.

Re:And why is this better than VNC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried logging in multiple concurrent different users via VNC? Try, before you just make an idiot out of yourself next time.

Re:And why is this better than VNC?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

VNC is a rather inefficient protocol. It basically works by sending periodic screenshots of the host system to the remote one, whereas RDP sends just enough information to the other end to render the screen on its own. Basically it is just a hell of a lot more efficient on bandwidth and CPU usage.

Re:And why is this better than VNC?

[tgd]

RDP on windows at least outperforms VNC by a wide margin both on fast and slow network connections.

It should -- VNC is doing screen scraping. RDP is hooked in deep into the GDI and can see the underlying API calls. (Technically speaking, VNC could do the same thing, but doesn't.) Its a lot closer to how remote X works than VNC.

Re:And why is this better than VNC?

[gagol]

TightVNC on linux creates a headless X server that handles the API directly and is quite efficient. I just found it a bit unstable when doing intensive work on it, like flash games or virtualbox VM...

Re:And why is this better than VNC?

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is no better. Take a look at the patch, it's sending 64x64 tiles. This isn't Remote Desktop Protocol in the Microsoft sense of the word (which is a GDI streaming protocol) it's essentially a cut down version of VNC and will be no better. To see the difference try using a non-Apple VNC client to connect to a Retina MacBook or iMac over *DSL and see how long it takes for the first screenful of data to come down the line (about 90-120 seconds at 2560x1440), then repeat the experiment using an Apple Remote Desktop client connecting to the same host. With the latter it's almost as if you're sitting on the local console. The reason: Apple's Remote Desktop client switches to Apple RDP, similar to Microsoft RDP, after authenticating with the VNC-like host.

Re:And why is this better than VNC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love head :)

Re:And why is this better than VNC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to give you head.

Rootless?

[Hatta]

Doesn't RDP forward an entire desktop? If so, that's no replacement for X forwarding. But maybe FreeRDP is more capable than Microsoft's version. What the hell are we using Microsoft technology anyway?

Re:Rootless?

[jabuzz]

You would be wrong then. RDP 6.1 along with Windows Server 2008 introduced RemoteApp which allows a single application to be forwarded rather than a whole desktop.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

stupid.

RDP has worked better than any linux solution in practice.

Re:Rootless?

[h4rr4r]

Wow, windows finally has a proper shell and program forwarding.

Any word on when it will be able to delete files that are open?

One of these days that OS really will catch up to the 80s.

Re:Rootless?

[h4rr4r]

Not if you wanted to forward the display of a single application. Your use case is not everyones use case.

I understand it now does that too, which is great.

Re:Rootless?

[barjam]

Whatever it does RDP is far, far faster and more versatile than X forwarding. X forwarding is slow and buggy to the point that I use vnc on my unix servers and vnc is awful.

Re:Rootless?

[h4rr4r]

Really?
Because I use X forwarding all the damn time. Mind you only on the LAN.

Newer VNC is not too bad either, but the normal ones suck. Have you tried TigerVNC?

Re:Rootless?

[quetwo]

A few things :
  - Microsoft RDP clients are pre-installed on every Windows based client since Windows XP/Server 2003. This means that a majority of non-slashdot-reading admins have all the tools they need to connect to it already installed.
  - Microsoft RDP is a lot faster than VNC/X11 forwarding. For one, they do smart bitmap-caching. VNC is screen-shots only (using some sensing of what has changed on the screen to send the diffs), and X11 forwarding were pretty much just UI elements, which made interacting with certain applications difficult or ackward.
  - Later RDP versions allow you to forward just specific applications, in addition to the entire workspace. I don't know if FreeRDP supports this feature yet, but it is built into the protocol.

Re:Rootless?

[rnturn]

``Because I use X forwarding all the damn time. Mind you only on the LAN.''

I've used it on LANs. I've used it across my crummy IDSL link. And I've even used it on dial-up. Only when using very graphics intensive applications on dial-up did I find the performance awful (and, fortunately, I only needed to resort to dial-up during those rare times that the VPN access was down). Caveat: I'm not trying to play games via X11 connections which may be why it works well for me and so badly for the folks who are in favor of Wayland.

I find it amusing that some people are touting how wonderful the implementation of RDP is on Windows 2008 server. I need to access remote UNIX systems, not Windows servers. Those of us that use UNIX (almost exclusively or as exclusively as I can pull off) don't want something that is useful only for Win2008 Server systems. How will an RDP plug-in for Wayland accommodate UNIX/Linux desktops connecting to UNIX/Linux servers? Oh... I guess the people running UNIX servers will have to install a non-native layer to allow the Wayland folks access. That's just nuts.

(Personal opinion time: It seems there is a group of Linux developers who grew up developing for Windows and won't be happy until they've turned Linux into the Windows they would have liked to have seen. Too bad they never used UNIX/Linux as they were developing their programming skills.)

Re:Rootless?

[h4rr4r]

Non-native?
Rdesktop is a native linux app I use for when I have to deal with windows servers. The other way around I don't see why someone running wayland could not use X over SSH like the rest of us.

I cut my teeth on Solaris and my caplock key position proves it.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't RDP forward an entire desktop? If so, that's no replacement for X forwarding. But maybe FreeRDP is more capable than Microsoft's version. What the hell are we using Microsoft technology anyway?

Agreed. Unfortunately, most people --including an astounding number of IT personnel -- don't think that technology exists outside of Microsoft. I actually had a senior programmer tell me Microsoft invented ftp because he used it in Internet Explorer. Microsoft, until recently, has been the defacto gatekeeper of technology for most people, IT professional or not. Sad to see that there's little chance for change since MS tends to do a "good enough" job making their software work and that's enough for most people. Even with the fact that Surface and MS phones have failed, people don't understand enough about technology to realize when someone is ripping them off.

Re:Rootless?

[wonkey_monkey]

For one, they do smart bitmap-caching. VNC is screen-shots only (using some sensing of what has changed on the screen to send the diffs)

So what's smart bitmap-caching then, if not (as I'm only naively guessing based on the name) "using some sensing of what has changed on the screen to send the diffs"?

Re:Rootless?

[Dr. Evil]

My use case includes sound, printing, the clipboard and preserving state when disconnected.

VNC will preserve your state, but your performance is gone and you still haven't solved sound, printing or the clipboard.

X11 might give you the middle-button buffer, but not the clipboard.

Re:Rootless?

[armanox]

  - Later RDP versions allow you to forward just specific applications, in addition to the entire workspace. I don't know if FreeRDP supports this feature yet, but it is built into the protocol.

Outside of Windows, this really doesn't exist. I think there is a paid-for program on Mac OS (not the MS RDP) that does this.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Caveat: I'm not trying to play games via X11 connections which may be why it works well for me and so badly for the folks who are in favor of Wayland.

Surely you are jesting. I use ssh connections on a terminal and I find THAT slow and unresponsive, using any user interface over the network makes me want to throw out. Please see the profile figures mentioned in the presentation: Chrome, running locally against the X server, blocks for half a second during startup with some tabs open in queries which should be instantaneous. That's ridiculous. It's half a second you have lost on your local machine, every time you open the browser. Extend that over the network and cry.

Actually you must be a troll or run only xeyes over the network. Or maybe after starting a program you go to the kitchen and make yourself a sandwitch while it loads so when you come back it's already finished drawing?

Re:Rootless?

[wiredlogic]

For one, they do smart bitmap-caching.

If you use a window manager and applications that use X primitives rather then drawing everything in bitmapped eyecandy the performance is much faster than RDP. All the anti X forwarding folks have never used the system as it was originally intended which is why we have to see it reinvented again... badly.

Re:Rootless?

[KingMotley]

RDP has been able to forward the display of a single application for 5+ years.

Re:Rootless?

[gbjbaanb]

no, RDP forwards all the bits that have changed - now simpler versions of it will happily forward everything (eg VNC at least in early incarnations, and Microsoft's own RDP protocol) but Citrix did a load of work reducing the amount of screen that was transferred over the network. Microsoft since took that and built it into the kernel (or graphics bits that are in the kernel) so that it became even more optimised - after all, if the OS only redraws a small section, only that section needs to be transferred.

So the MS version is very well built - because it was done by someone other than MS, as usual.

I doubt the FreeRDP is more capable, but it certainly shouldn't be any less capable.

Re:Rootless?

[KingMotley]

Not all that familiar with the innards of RDP myself, but the obvious difference is that a bitmap may or may not be visible on the screen, only partially visible, or repeatedly visible. This would allow parts of the bitmap that are currently not on the screen to be sent once to the client and reused over and over again, allowing smoother screen draws and less bandwidth/latency on incremental changes.

Re:Rootless?

[Lussarn]

So the cure to remote performance is to rewrite modern applications to 80 era style, because writing a display server that handles modern apps is doomed to be implemented badly...

Dude, just listen to yourself.

Re:Rootless?

[jedidiah]

You must be joking.

I've seen what VNC is capable of going from any combination of Unix, Windows, or MacOS.

VNC is just sad when compared to X.

Don't try to confuse RDP with VNC.

Re:Rootless?

[CRC'99]

- Later RDP versions allow you to forward just specific applications, in addition to the entire workspace. I don't know if FreeRDP supports this feature yet, but it is built into the protocol.

It does a lot more that just that...

$ xfreerdp --help

FreeRDP - A Free Remote Desktop Protocol Client
See http://www.freerdp.com/ for more information

Usage: xfreerdp [options] server:port
    -0: connect to console session
    -a: set color depth in bit, default is 16
    -c: initial working directory
    -D: hide window decorations
    -T: window title
    -d: domain
    -f: fullscreen mode
    -g: set geometry, using format WxH or X% or 'workarea', default is 1024x768
    -h: print this help
    -k: set keyboard layout ID
    -K: do not interfere with window manager bindings
    -m: don't send mouse motion events
    -n: hostname
    -o: console audio
    -p: password
    -s: set startup-shell
    -t: alternative port number, default is 3389
    -u: username
    -x: performance flags (m[odem], b[roadband] or l[an])
    -X: embed into another window with a given XID.
    -z: enable compression
    --app: RemoteApp connection. This implies -g workarea
    --ext: load an extension
    --no-auth: disable authentication
    --no-fastpath: disable fast-path
    --gdi: graphics rendering (hw, sw)
    --no-osb: disable offscreen bitmaps
    --no-bmp-cache: disable bitmap cache
    --plugin: load a virtual channel plugin
    --rfx: enable RemoteFX
    --rfx-mode: RemoteFX operational flags (v[ideo], i[mage]), default is video
    --nsc: enable NSCodec (experimental)
    --disable-wallpaper: disables wallpaper
    --composition: enable desktop composition
    --disable-full-window-drag: disables full window drag
    --disable-menu-animations: disables menu animations
    --disable-theming: disables theming
    --no-rdp: disable Standard RDP encryption
    --no-tls: disable TLS encryption
    --no-nla: disable network level authentication
    --ntlm: force NTLM authentication protocol version (1 or 2)
    --ignore-certificate: ignore verification of logon certificate
    --sec: force protocol security (rdp, tls or nla)
    --secure-checksum: use salted checksums with Standard RDP encryption
    --version: print version information

Re:Rootless?

[jedidiah]

X with compression and caching can work very well actually.

Across the Internet, it runs circles around what VNC can do locally on a gigabit network.

VNC is nothing to hold up as a solution for not having the networking features of X anymore.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

We aren't using Microsoft technology.
X11 is stable and feature complete.
Although Wayland/Weston is reinventing X11's wheels, who cares? X11 is good enough now. It doesn't need any more cruft. Wayland/Weston will provide a suitable distraction for programmers who want to add MS features to a Window System for some reason.
Everyone else can just continue ignoring it.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

The wayland folks are the same people who have been working on X for the last decade or two. Hardly some Windows developers. There is plenty of uninformed garbage in every discussion online, but the Wayland idiocy has to take the crown, for frequency of outright vitriol and falsehoods.

Check out the video in the summary.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

> The other way around I don't see why someone running wayland could not use X over SSH like the rest of us.
Because Wayland does not speak X. If you have to run an X client on Wayland, many think/fear that it will be like running X on Windows or Mac: buggy and inconsistent. The other fear is that people will stop developing with tools that support X and become Wayland only and then you CAN'T run it remotely.

Re:Rootless?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Any word on when it will be able to delete files that are open?

I suppose it already can, otherwise the SUA subsystem would be unimplementable.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up, rdesktop isn't perfect but it's still damn good.

Re:Rootless?

[perlith]

I've used it on LANs. I've used it across my crummy IDSL link. And I've even used it on dial-up

Try it on a satellite connection with 700ms+ ping times. Usable, but significant delay even when trying to do a simple tab completion when changing directories ... 1 second delay between each directory change. Not bad by itself, but extremely annoying in total delay when working long periods.

I have a Windows box at work which I RDP into and then daisy-chain from the Windows box to X or VNC into other *Nix machines at work because RDP is that much better over my satellite link. If I had to pick a good second behind RDP, I'd go with NX.

Re:Rootless?

[Dr. Evil]

"Oh... I guess the people running UNIX servers will have to install a non-native layer to allow the Wayland folks access. That's just nuts. ?

That's a pretty flimsy straw-man. Of course you'd install an X Server on Windows.

What settings are you using for X over dialup?

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

``Because I use X forwarding all the damn time. Mind you only on the LAN.''

I've used it on LANs. I've used it across my crummy IDSL link. And I've even used it on dial-up. Only when using very graphics intensive applications on dial-up did I find the performance awful (and, fortunately, I only needed to resort to dial-up during those rare times that the VPN access was down). Caveat: I'm not trying to play games via X11 connections which may be why it works well for me and so badly for the folks who are in favor of Wayland.

I find it amusing that some people are touting how wonderful the implementation of RDP is on Windows 2008 server. I need to access remote UNIX systems, not Windows servers. Those of us that use UNIX (almost exclusively or as exclusively as I can pull off) don't want something that is useful only for Win2008 Server systems. How will an RDP plug-in for Wayland accommodate UNIX/Linux desktops connecting to UNIX/Linux servers? Oh... I guess the people running UNIX servers will have to install a non-native layer to allow the Wayland folks access. That's just nuts.

(Personal opinion time: It seems there is a group of Linux developers who grew up developing for Windows and won't be happy until they've turned Linux into the Windows they would have liked to have seen. Too bad they never used UNIX/Linux as they were developing their programming skills.)

We have had native RDP client for Linux for a long time now, you'd know if you don't constrain yourself to one platform. You can also run xrdp, Xvnc, and straight X side by side on the same server very quickly and see the difference in performance, and the session persistence of xvnc/xrdp should be immediately obvious, and THEN there's printer/share/audio forwarding, and encryption options available to RDP, but we don't even need to go there before in practical terms, you are ahead of straight X in features & performance.

What are you even bringing to this discussion with exactly zero experience with RDP on any platform, or even xvnc apparently?

Re:Rootless?

[Svartalf]

This depends on your method of X forwarding. NX does a pretty good job and isn't slow and is less "buggy" (well, you can't do GLX, but trying to do that via a VPN would be...evil...)- along with handling pretty low bandwidth links well.

Having said this, if RDP does a good enough job and Wayland untangles the whole POSIX desktop world, I'd say it's pretty much a win- esp. if I can do the RDP remoting over moderately low bandwidth links.

Re:Rootless?

[quetwo]

Essentially, the client can request a bitmap representation of an element, or the native UI component. For example, common UI components are sent as UIElements and SkinParts. SkinParts can be sent as vector items (like gradients, lines, etc), or bitmaps themselves. So, for example if you run calc.exe, the client can request the app as a stack of UI elements (essentially, how the GDI plans on drawing the components to the screen). All the buttons, etc. are sent as a component package which describes how the element should look. If it uses a bitmap as a part of its chrome, it is sent as a separate SkinPart.

You can also get bitmap representations of components if the OS thinks it is too difficult to draw them (or the developer just threw a bunch of bitmaps together to represent common UI components). When this happens, calls into the GDI update the RDP server to let it know that a component of size X/Y at X/Y has updated. It's a lot smarter than VNC which has to watch the screen and updates the screen in a 1/x method.

X11 is a bit more primitive... It expects the UI components to be created and skinned by the client. This is really only useful/consistent if both the client and the server are running the same WM. Users of RDP get the same experience regardless of their client.

Re:Rootless?

[snadrus]

Caching the way a button looks, the way your titlebar looks, possibly down to each letter on the screen.,All these are stored Client-side by the Server's request, so instead of sending a 24bpp bitmap of the word "cat" (a few kb), it references a previous: "c.jpg, a.jpg, t.jpg" (which is only a few bytes). It also caches whole windows so a window move isn't expensive.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the cure to remote performance is to rewrite modern applications to 80 era style, because writing a display server that handles modern apps is doomed to be implemented badly...

Finally someone is making sense in this discussion! A breath of fresh air.

Dude, just listen to yourself.

Oh, you were being sarcastic. Forget the compliment.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite that impressive copy-paste, I don't actually see an option for '-w forward window with argument as window id' or something, except for -g, which is a pain in the ass to use. --app looks decent, except for the reliance on -g, but no information is given by it beyond a 'RemoteApp' session, whatever that is. Does that mean the App itself is remote? Does it mean that Apps I spawn are rendered remotely? Does it find an App and pull it from being remote? Instead of being a smart aleck and posting the output of -h, you could at LEAST have posted a link to the manual so that I could see more than brief refreshers on which mnemonic is which action.

(Note that I've already installed it and read the manual myself, so I know all the answers to my above questions. I'm just pointing out how utterly unhelpful your comment was.)

Re:Rootless?

[SiChemist]

From your statement, you obviously haven't used NX/X2Go. Very fast even over slow connections.

Re:Rootless?

[BitZtream]

I have 3 clients for OSX, including the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client. They all support it. Only one of them (Jump Desktop) cost money.

It is not a feature of the client, but of the server. Any client is capable of doing it, some just actually offer a way for the client to request do it without the server forcing it on you.

Re:Rootless?

[SiChemist]

I don't care about RDP either, but have you ever used NX/X2Go instead of straight X forwarding? I find it is much faster and usable even over slow(ish) connections.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't RDP forward an entire desktop? If so, that's no replacement for X forwarding. But maybe FreeRDP is more capable than Microsoft's version. What the hell are we using

I used to run RDP over dialup modems and it was usable to get work done. RDP is insanely good. It blew alternatives such as VNC and PCA out of the water in quality and performance. X11 over broadband is completely unusable today while RDP over broadband is often indisingushable from sitting in front of the computer.

Microsoft technology anyway?

What about technical merit? This is all really shit citrix did eons ago.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

RDP also deals with drawing primatives. I worked pretty extensively with the FreeRdp code for a project. RDP is a pretty nice protocol, and FreeRdp is an excellent implementation of it.

Re:Rootless?

[bill_mcgonigle]

I use vnc on my unix servers and vnc is awful.

Yeah? I do my daily work via a VNC connection to localhost (I run a headless VNC instance for my main work desktop, 1920x1200x32 so it's portable). I usually forget and only notice when the videos don't have sound. I often do work from home to it on a 7Mbps DSL connection and only see lag on full-screen re-draws). Both ends are tigervnc.

Oh, and pointers to a working PulseAudio HOWTO on doing multi-user sound are welcome.

Re:Rootless?

[sjames]

Sadly, no. The closest it can get is delete on close. There are many such infelicities in Windows, even very simple concepts like atomic file rename, fork, and exec are absent.

Re:Rootless?

[armanox]

It's dependent on the version of the protocol supported by the client as well. Just like MS RDP on Mac does not support remote gateways. RDC 2.0 doesn't support RemoteApp - it supports opening a desktop session with the shell changed to whatever program you want, but it does not support RemoteApp.

Re:Rootless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody really cares about failed Micro$oft security implementations.

Re:Rootless?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Sadly, no. The closest it can get is delete on close. There are many such infelicities in Windows, even very simple concepts like atomic file rename, fork, and exec are absent.

Does this mean that the Unix subsystem for Windows doesn't actually implement the Unix behavior? I imagine that this would have to break many applications.

Re:Rootless?

[sjames]

Posix applications are very much second class citizens in Windows. If your app uses the posix subsystem, it loses a lot of other functionality. Only some editions of the various Windows versions have the support at all. It was only added in the first place to technically meet U.S. federal purchasing requirements but never really sufficed for any practical use..

And practically none of the elegance of Unix is evident in the standard Windows API.

Re:Rootless?

[TemporalBeing]

VNC sucks. RDP sucks a little less.

That said, I've shunted entire X sessions - the whole GNOME/KDE desktop - over the Internet. Performance was pretty decent - all using X11 forwarding over SSH. (Yeah, I basically logged in via SSH with X forwarding enabled and ran "startx". Overlayed my own desktop.)

Nothing Compares To X11 Transparency!

[Anonymous Coward]

For the past 10 years I have been repeatedly lambasted for complaining that RDP and ICA were superior to X11 transparency and VNC with seemingly nothing being done to address the issue. Naturally, this made me a clueless troll. Blah, blah blah.

Now, with RDP copied and inserted into Wayland "we can expect Wayland's remote desktop to surpass X.Org's network transparency".

Fan boys are pathetic. LOL. I for one, welcome any improvement over X11 transparency and VNC. Anything at all.

Re:Nothing Compares To X11 Transparency!

[CajunArson]

Even better... watch the full video and you'll note that any version of X that isn't in a museum does not actually implement network transparency anymore (instead it's more of a network fallback to a less-capable graphics display).

Re:Nothing Compares To X11 Transparency!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with NX?

Re:Nothing Compares To X11 Transparency!

[unixisc]

In fact, doesn't this resolve the one concern X11 fans have about Wayland - the loss of remote desktop support? Aside from the fact that X clients can be supported on Wayland?

Re:Nothing Compares To X11 Transparency!

[Alomex]

X has been broken since inception, which is why it underwent a major rewrite for X11. It was still a failure. Everybody knew that back then, which is why so many alternatives have been proposed. Sadly none of them gathered enough steam to replace X11. Wayland looks like it has finally accomplished this. Not a decade (or two) too soon I might add.

X11 RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

The big benefit of the X11 protocol is that you don't need to pull the full desktop. If I need a window each from multiple machines I don't need a desktop to go with it. That takes far too much space. I want to have a remote running application on my desktop. I don't want the remote desktop on mine.

An important feature for me

[etnoy]

This is excellent news and has changed my mind regarding Wayland. A successor to X11 really needs good remote control functionality, but it doesn't have to be done the way X11 did it. I now look forward to a future with Wayland.

Re:An important feature for me

[kobaz]

The way X11 does forwarding is very handy and useful, and I make use of it fairly often. But as usual, there's more than one proverbial way to skin the proverbial cat.

X11 forwarding is great for high speed and low latency connections such as a lan. Using it on anything else is asking for trouble, because if you lose your connection, you lose your app. Perhaps an improvement can be made to X11 forwarding in the new path forward (wayland) to make it more like screen where you can attach and detach to a running X11 app from a networked endpoint.

Remote desktop using RDP is superior to X11 forwarding for lossy connections because once the screen is loaded, very minimal draw/drag/etc communications are sent between the server and client for updates, X11 is far more data intensive for screen updates. And of course if you lose your connection (which I frequently do, trying to RDP from my cell phone), you'll get your apps back when you reconnect.

Having both X11 forwarding and RDP is a great choice, and I hope something similar to my aforementioned improvement makes it into the app.

Re:An important feature for me

[jabuzz]

The problem is that the current implementation is effectively VNC done using the RDP protocol. That is it is just sending the changed areas of the screen. What is needed is something more like x11rdp. That is an X11 server that rather than talking to hardware spits out RDP protocol instead. Draw a rectangle on the X11 screen and the corresponding RDP gets spat down the line to the client. It is much much faster than VNC which is a total dog over slow links, rather like X11 being a total dog on links that don't have really low latency.

Re:An important feature for me

[Skrapion]

The nice thing about the Wayland stack is that it's much easier to replace parts of the stack with something else. I'm sure this won't be the last remoting protocol we see layered on top of Wayland.

Re:An important feature for me

[Hatta]

Great, just what we need, multiple incompatible remote rendering back ends.

Re:An important feature for me

[Skrapion]

You already have multiple incompatible remote rendering back ends in X, it's just really hard to do in X. The reason the Unix mantra "do one thing well" is so important is because it allows you to swap out parts and innovate more easily.

Re:An important feature for me

[Hatta]

As long as I'm guaranteed that my local display can talk to remote applications, no matter what the flavor of the month is, I'll be happy. There needs to be a universal standard.

Re:An important feature for me

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Using it on anything else is asking for trouble, because if you lose your connection, you lose your app. Perhaps an improvement can be made to X11 forwarding in the new path forward (wayland) to make it more like screen where you can attach and detach to a running X11 app from a networked endpoint.

I used NX for X11 over VPN. It works very well and I am able to resume where I left off if my VPN connection drops or I want to let something run overnight but don't want to remain online. NoMachine closed source their server at version 4.0, but FreeNX and Neatx took its place.

Re:An important feature for me

[serviscope_minor]

The problem is that the current implementation is effectively VNC done using the RDP protocol.

heh yes. At some point they'll realise that it's a good idea to have display related settings tied to a physical screen, not a local filesystem and reimplement xrdb too.

Re:An important feature for me

[Anonymous Coward]

and Wayland RDP won't leave even 8 year linux veterans scratching their heads.

Re:An important feature for me

[jedidiah]

The problem you are describing doesn't exist.

Re:An important feature for me

[nebosuke]

There needs to be a universal standard.

This just cries out for the obligatory xkcd.

Re:An important feature for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Wayland is making even 8 year linux veterans scratch their heads.

Re:An important feature for me

[SiChemist]

X2Go is also very good.

Re:An important feature for me

[Anonymous Coward]

X11 being a total dog on links that don't have really low latency.

Why should X11 be so sensitive to latencies? XTerm certainly isn't. I have a feeling it's the toolkits' fault. They are conditioning their behavior too much on responses from the server. X11 allows everything to be pipelined.

At the same time, the X11 primitives ("windows") are probably too low-level. The widgets and themes should probably be managed autonomously by the display server and the protocol should be passing more-or-less HTML forms. Hell, maybe the X server should simply be a sandbox for an executable theme manager that gets downloaded from the client. All rendering would be done locally at the display server and the toolkit would freely define the networking protocol.

Re:An important feature for me

[Trogre]

Personally, I have found xpra an essential tool for any kind of remote X. Much the same performance improvements as FreeNX IMO, but with more features and easier to set up.

I have on my remote box X11 programs running in xpra sessions that I launched months ago that I "connect" to as I please. This is really killing two birds:
1. Responsive X over high-latency links
2. Persistent "screen" for X

Re:An important feature for me

[fikx]

What I got from the video was that Apps are using X11 like VNC on a per window basis...not that X itself works like that. Their reasons may be good or bad, but X does not work that way in of itself.

serviscope_minor...

[Anonymous Coward]

is going to be pissed!

For those About to Whine!

[CajunArson]

We don't Salute You!

For the next 100 posts whining about how this isn't exactly like forwarding an Xterm over an SSH tunnel (think about how stupid that is for a second)... X IS NOT NETWORK TRANSPARENT

What? That a lie! 1985 sez X is network transparent!
Well guess what: Modern versions of X are *not* network transparent anymore because to use any of the modern features of X that make using a modern Linux desktop even remotely enjoyable, you are breaking the classic backwards server-client paradigm of X. Sure, there's still a fallback mode for transferring data over networks, but lots and lots of modern features that you expect in a modern desktop GUI break in the process, which is *not* transparency, but is instead more of a network fallback.

Frankly, having tried to use both X and RDP over real connections using the real Internet, I'd take RDP any day of the week. I still remember the finger-pointing amongst developers of different projects when I pointed out that packets were being sent over the network each and every time my cursor blinked. Get over it guys, 1985 wasn't the be-all end-all pinnacle of graphics development.

Still don't believe me? How about clicking the link to Dan's talk about X where he says the exact same thing I just said. He's only been working on X development for over 10 years though, so I'm sure that some guy who sorta got X forwarding working over a gigabit link is much much more informed that he is....

Re:For those About to Whine!

[CajunArson]

Your sig says: Censorship is obscene.

Well it looks like you self-censored my post by not bothering to read past the first couple of lines and also censored an X developer who agrees with me and not you. So, aside from admitting that you are obscene, please list your evidence and credentials for why you are right and a guy who has been deeply involved in developing X for over 10 years is stupid....

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Skrapion]

"Network transparent" means you can look at the bits over the wire and tell what it's doing. You can't do this with X nowadays, because nowadays it sends whole frame buffers instead of individual drawing commands. It's network opaque. Yes, X supports remoting, but it's not network transparent anymore.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Hatta]

Network transparent means that the application performs the same whether it's local or remote. It's transparent to the user, not transparent to a network sniffer.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to whine about this quite alot, mostly the reason for this is the lack of spelling out a vision for network transparent Wayland. The only thing that was said by the Wayland devs initially was that you could run an X11 server on-top of Wayland (which was never really the reason that people complained and asked about Wayland and network transparency).

The key issue is that unless Wayland supports the rootless remoting of apps, it will never be possible to replace X11, the feature is simply used too much and in mission critical settings for this ability to disappear; however the Wayland developers never really addressed this issue publicly, and until a couple of months ago, no one mentioned rootless remoting of Wayland windows.

They could have shut everyone up by just spelling out the technical roadmap to rootless remoting, instead they just kept on talking about how X11 servers would run on-top of Wayland, which was not really why people where interested in X11 anyway.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then it is not network transparent by that definition either.

With all the window manager features that require X extensions that ONLY work over shared memory (not even a local socket pipe, let alone a network socket!) things most certainly look VERY different.

Perhaps if all you are doing is forwarding a single Xterm, then sure it will look the same. A single desktop with window manager however? Not even close.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

>Network transparent means that the application performs the same whether it's local or remote.

With X11 it does not. Therefore it isn't network transparent.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Alioth]

That's just pedantry.

In terms of "network transparent", what is meant is that a program doesn't care (it just communicates with whatever DISPLAY is set to) and the end user doesn't care. What the server does behind the scenes is irrelevant to how it's used.

If on Wayland, while you're in an SSH session to a remote machine you think..."hmm, I could really do with a couple of wterms" (or whatever the Wayland xterm equivalent is), or "I could really do with firing up wireshark", you can't just type "xterm" and be done then it's not network transparent to the user. If you then have to set up another session and do some desktop-style login (and the remote server has to be running some sort of GUI login manager or equivalent to handle it) then it's a lot less useful than what you get with X11 at the moment.

If on the other hand Wayland will allow the equivalent of ssh -X, then it doesn't matter how it's implemented, so long as the program running at the other end runs and doesn't care that the display is remote, and the user sees a window on their screen, then they have the functional equivalent however it's implemented.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hatta, you've proven yourself time and time again to be a troll and a fucking idiot. For once, just sit this one out. You're done.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Hatta]

Meh. I haven't noticed any significant differences.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Skrapion]

The Wayland devs were definitely a little too obscure whenever the issue of remoting came up. They kept saying that remoting was out of scope with regard to Wayland, and technically, they were right, but it lead to a lot of misunderstandings.

Imagine if somebody asked "Does the Linux kernel support email?" Of course it doesn't; email is done way higher in the stack. There's not a single line of code in the Linux kernel that has anything to do with email. But you would be giving people the wrong impression if you said "Linux doesn't support email", and that's exactly what the Wayland devs were doing.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[CajunArson]

The very fact that FreeNX exists is absolute proof that X has fundamental issues and you have admitted that those issues exist and that another layer of complexity needs to be added around X is a direct admission that X isn't cutting it!

You also lied in your original post when you said you forward over X and therefore X is transparent.

1. No you don't forward over X, you use a much more convoluted FreeNX setup.

2. Forwarding != Transparency. If you think it does, then FreeRDP is also network transparent! Modern X is basically a less-efficient screen-scraping version of RDP, and everything that FreeNX does makes X more like RDP in a kludgy manner!

3. Please stop insulting X developers who have put a whole lot more time and effort into developing these systems than you have ever done. If you were more respectful you'd actually watch the video in TFA and come up with an intelligent response instead just repeating over & over that "I GOT AN XTERM TO FORWARD EVERYONE ELSE IS STUPID!"

Being disingenuous and hiding the truth.. which is exactly what you did in your original post when you said "X" and really meant the kludge-fest that is "FreeNX" is also a form of censorship, so try being more honest and less sanctimonious, self-righteous, and obscene in the future, mkay?

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Hatta]

NX is just a proxy. I use X forwarding in conjuction with NX, it follows that I use X forwarding. There is nothing disingenuous about that. You might as well complain that I'm not using HTTP because I have a caching proxy.

I do agree that X forwarding is not perfect as it is, but it can be fixed by building NX into X, or into SSH, instead of throwing away the entire display system.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[rnturn]

``... you are breaking the classic backwards server-client paradigm of X.''

I found it hard to take much of your argument seriously when you wrote the above. "Client-server" does not mean "PC client running Windows-Windows server. The Wintel crowd pretty much co-opted the term "client-server" and when they encounter a case where "server" doesn't mean a Windows server, they go nuts.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

RDP is for people who mount a network drive and then click MS Word on that drive and don't understand why it won't run. It's for people who don't understand networking. RDP, is overkill.

However, there is hope since, as a previous write indicated, the latest versions of Windows server do not run a desktop (what novel idea? Who say MS isn't innovative!).

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the stack used to include network transparency, and due to the changes imposed to it by the Wayland crew it no longer did. So it's not so much of an absurd proposition as "Linux doesn't support email" as something akin to "vim doesn't support email, but emacs does," if you imagine that brand new vim was being pushed as a replacement to the aging emacs, and if email was a bit more built in to emacs to make the analogy work. It's a feature which shouldn't obviously be part of the system, but that when in place becomes surprisingly useful.

I still have a few concerns with wayland, all of which are still based around this, such as
  - If remote rendering was being left out, is there anything else I take for granted that is left out?
  - Were the devs so reluctant to include it because it didn't fit their vision, or because they weren't capable?
  - If 1, does their vision work for me*, and if 2, how worried should I be?
  - Is the RDP scheme as efficient and usable as X's remote rendering, and can it do everything X could [short of sending primitive instructions]?

But I'm not nearly as worried as I was before. They've proven that they are willing to accept major patches from the community if necessary, and that counts for quite a lot, and removes a lot of the issues with (*).

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. You got put in your place, and now you're all "meh, I haven't noticed..." What happened to the screamed, frothing accusations of "liar!"?

Rather than make yourself look more of a dickwad, how about "I'm sorry, I didn't really know what I was talking about when I wrote that. Thank you for correcting me."?

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, what people these days means by "network transparency" is the "ssh -X" behaviour. And in fact, this is not X network transparency:
- "ssh -X" here is used as a proxy and from the point of view of the X client, it looks like a _local_ X server.
- "ssh -X" has not been developed as part of X, it is a totally _independant_ program!
Moreover, distributions have configured the X server by default to listen only to localhost, for years...

So, what people want is a "ssh -W" extension to ssh. Same as what has been done for X.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Hatta]

Fair enough. If you want to nitpick on network transparency vs forwarding, I'll grant you that. X forwarding drops some features. But it doesn't drop any useful features. Only eye candy.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet is full of "works for me, lah lah lah!" people...

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please read before replying.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, at the core of that whole proxying setup is the network transparency that is X network transparency- without the latter, the former wouldn't be as simple or even likely possible.

Without something like the patches we're discussing, you're going to have fun implementing a "ssh -W" proxy in the same manner. Now, you can do it almost trivially.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[wagnerrp]

Actually, compositing window managers have been transitioning to OpenGL and indirect rendering through AIGLX, allowing those things to once again operate transparently over the network using only the X11 protocol.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[wagnerrp]

Network transparency in X11 is a result of the development environment. All IPC in UNIX was traditionally done through sockets. If your application and server are already communicating over a socket, then it really makes no difference whether that is a local file socket, or a remote network socket. X11 network transparency was basically a happy coincidence.

Starting with OSX, Windows Vista, and Compiz, there has been a shift towards using the 3D hardware in graphics cards to do all UI rendering. Traditionally on X11, this required special extensions that provided direct access to the display hardware, removing the ability for application clients to connect to display servers over the network. AIGLX was developed to allow this interaction to operate over the traditional X11 socket, thus preserving network transparency. The trouble is that this was a huge, convoluted amount of code, adding lots of overhead and numerous bugs.

Weyland was started basically as a reaction to AIGLX. Rather than spending lots of effort abstracting hardware access to maintain networkability, they dropped that requirement and started fresh. The emacs email analogy isn't very accurate, because they're changing THE fundamental design characteristic. It would be more like Linus waking up one morning and deciding he likes microkernels now, scrapping the entirety of the existing monolithic Linux as a result.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[wagnerrp]

No. You are an idiot. 127.0.0.1 is a network address. When you are using 127.0.0.1 as your display, all your X11 traffic is operating over the network. You are using network transparency.

The lack of network transparency is when you use things like SHM, or DRM, things that need direct access to hardware, and cannot operate over the network.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Cid Highwind]

Windows doesn't even enter into it. "Client-server" traditionally meant that the client ran on one user's local machine, and the server ran on a big multi-user remote system. In X11 nomenclature every user sits in front of his own individual "server", its unarguably backwards from standard usage.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[ArsonSmith]

By server you actually mean "display server" which is exactly right and by client you man application client making requests to draw stuff on that server. Which is also exactly right.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, it's just software, relax.

For non-Gbit lan connections, 'ssh -CX' isn't quite as snappy as NX, but it's certainly usable and if you don't want or need a full desktop session it works fine.

As far as I'm concerned, more options mean more chances to match the best method to the current situation, which is a good thing.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[Trogre]

Strictly speaking you are of course correct. However let's modify the X proponents claim a bit to better reflect what they actually mean:

X is, to all intents and purposes for the end user, still network transparent.

By that I mean the behaviour to an end user is the same as if it were truly 100% pure Network Transparent. Granted it's slow as hell if run raw unassisted over a high latency low-bandwidth network but that is a solved problem with the likes of xpra and FreeNX.

If Wayland could do that, then there would be no issue.

Re:For those About to Whine!

[sjames]

And the reason an independent program can integrate so closely as if they were made to work together is (drum roll please).....

X is network transparent! TA-DA!

Re:For those About to Whine!

[complete loony]

I've been wondering for a while if it's worth building a UI focused, sandboxed virtual machine. Something that could be used to draw basic widget animations in response to mouse and keyboard events, while messages are passed back to the server your application is really running on.

Those who do not understand X11

[Anonymous Coward]

Are doomed to re-implement it. Poorly.

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody understands X11 then, because Wayland devs are also X11 devs. Enjoy.

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody understands X11 then,

A true statement has just been spoken...

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[serviscope_minor]

Nobody understands X11 then, because Wayland devs are also X11 devs. Enjoy.

Which makes the results more surprising. You should see some of the stuff that Keith Packard has spewed about X, especially the stuff about strings and atoms. He's basically set up very nice straw man to attack, but that is really all.

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's slashdot, but if you would have a look at the video linked in the summary, you would find out that the people behind this, are people who understand x deeper than basically anyone else.

Also X as used today isn't network transparent anymore anyways.

rtfa.

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[jedidiah]

Your bad rhetoric is unconvincing. Your appeal to authority is the mark of a simpleton. Meanwhile, many of us continue to effectively use X remotely both on local networks and across the Internet.

So, that feature needs to be in any attempt to mindlessly flee from X.

It also needs to not suck (like VNC on MacOS does).

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[chris.alex.thomas]

wrong.

all that needs to happen is enough of us to care less about your precious remote X functionality and you'll be forced to ditch it, support it yourself or program it yourself.

so people mindlessly fleeing from X, might not even care about a feature they never used......ever

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[serviscope_minor]

all that needs to happen is enough of us to care less about your precious remote X functionality and you'll be forced to ditch it

Sigh. Linux used to be the world of possibilities where unusual behaviour was expected and no one in their right mind would put up barriers to their fellow hacker.

What happened?

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[Anonymous Coward]

Lennart Poettering

(Grin, Duck, and Run)

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[Anonymous Coward]

If jedidiah and his ilk want they're free to maintain X11. The problem is that he's doesn't contribute anything and wants other people to do all the work. This is very common among GNU zealots.

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[Anonymous Coward]

There would be no barriers to fellow, active hackers who don't mind doing things themselves. But for hackers that are interested in perusing other computer tasks that involve using their tools instead of spending all their time working on the tools (or are just lazy...) there have always been barriers. They are subject to the whim of project maintainers, and project forks. Forking a project doesn't mean people are actively stopping you from using the older version, but if no one is around to maintain the original branch, it may accumulate problems and incompatibilities with time.

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[Anonymous Coward]

"all that needs to happen is enough of us to care less about your precious remote X functionality"

Uh, did you read the topic of this thread?

How remote functionality is going into Wayland. You know, what you think everyone is fleeing from.

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[Anonymous Coward]

Keith Packard is almost the only reason that X has managed to stay relevant in the past decade.

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[fikx]

I'm always curious about this attitude: how does being a developer make you an expert on something. Does someone who builds a highrise know everything about the building once it's full of people using it? How does that logic work?

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[chris.alex.thomas]

nobody has put up barriers to anybody, but I will hack on what I want to hack and if it's not remote X functionality, then it's something else.

what you seem to be expecting, is that I support technologies that you want, at my expense, using my time.

I guess that isnt the answer you were looking for, but it's the reality.

Re:Those who do not understand X11

[chris.alex.thomas]

perhaps if you read the comment I wrote in the context of the thread it was started from, you'd understand that what you said was incorrect and you're jumping on the wrong person :)

Re:X11 RDP

[CajunArson]

Starting in 2008 RDP doesn't require this either, please go read all about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Desktop_Protocol#Version_6.1

Re:X11 RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

RDP can now do this as well. ICA has been doing it since the mid 1990's. But, even when pulling the entire desktop, or just an app window. RDP is orders of magnitude faster and uses orders of magnitude less bandwidth than X11, even when transferring video and sound!

wrong approach to client-server programming

[StripedCow]

While Wayland may solve some mundane issues with the client-server nature of remote desktops, I think in general a completely different programming model is needed for client-server applications. For one, the programming language should naturally support the notion of doing stuff in a non-blocking way (C/C++ does not naturally support this; simulating this requires working with threads or tinkering with even more low-level machinery).

Re:wrong approach to client-server programming

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you even talking about, dood?

Re:wrong approach to client-server programming

[serviscope_minor]

For one, the programming language should naturally support the notion of doing stuff in a non-blocking way (C/C++ does not naturally support this; simulating this requires working with threads or tinkering with even more low-level machinery).

You what?

Unix has offered non blocking calls more or less since forever, and C was basically invented in order to write unix.

read() can operate in non blocking mode just fine. You might want to check the man pages for read() and select().

Re:wrong approach to client-server programming

[StripedCow]

Sorry, but select() doesn't cut it. Using select, you are forced to write ugly event-driven code, with objects representing event-handlers, where all you want to do is run a bunch of snippets of code, where each of them executes as soon as the data is available.

And by the way, using select() you can't even wait for both a file descriptor and a semaphore simultaneously, but that is a different story.

Re:wrong approach to client-server programming

[serviscope_minor]

Using select, you are forced to write ugly event-driven code, with objects representing event-handlers, where all you want to do is run a bunch of snippets of code, where each of them executes as soon as the data is available

How is it ugly? You can do what you want in a few lines of code with a base class, select and a std::unordered_map. With a small amount of care, you can also store a lambda in the derived class, meaning that you have a map of file descriptors to literally code snippits that get run on demand. You could use function pointers if you prefer, too.

Or, run one per thread, which C++ supports natively, including implicit stuff like futures and promises. Again, you can create threads off lambdas, so you can just run a code snipped to deal with a resource in a different thread.

And by the way, using select() you can't even wait for both a file descriptor and a semaphore simultaneously, but that is a different story.

That is true, but you can use pipes for synchronisation well enough. Also, you can (Linux extension) select on POSIX message queues.

Re:wrong approach to client-server programming

[StripedCow]

Sorry, but I want expressiveness without seeing all the ugly low-level stuff.

To go back to the original topic, Wayland needs to remove round-trip times to make the system faster and more responsive.
How can a compiler decide to move code from the client to the server or vice versa if all the plumb-work gets in the way?

Re:wrong approach to client-server programming

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, where are you going with my goalposts?

Re:wrong approach to client-server programming

[serviscope_minor]

Sorry, but I want expressiveness without seeing all the ugly low-level stuff.

Even versus callback driven is a matter of taste. I strongly suspect there will soon be some good C++11 libraries for callback driven I/O since the language can do it very prettily.

Re:wrong approach to client-server programming

[tgd]

While Wayland may solve some mundane issues with the client-server nature of remote desktops, I think in general a completely different programming model is needed for client-server applications. For one, the programming language should naturally support the notion of doing stuff in a non-blocking way (C/C++ does not naturally support this; simulating this requires working with threads or tinkering with even more low-level machinery).

I expect we'll see more posts like this now that so many states have decriminalized weed.

Summary Creates Confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

...which adds support for FreeRDP, an open-source remote desktop protocol.

FreeRDP is a free implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), released under the Apache license.

FreeRDP is NOT a protocol in itself..
I had to go to the website to sort out the confusion.. :-/

That You, Fanboy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm. A pedantic retort that completely ignores the root issue. Are you one of the fan boys, or am I misinterpreting your post?

The issue is that the end user functionality of using remote desktop like features under X11, Xorg, Wayland, all suck massive balls when compared to the likes of RDP and ICA. The only thing close to being as unpleasant to use as X11 is VNC. They may have been the best available in 1995, but they have sucked since then and continue to do so today. Any attempt to defend them in this regard is a clear indication that the defender has never used the the other products or attempted to do an real graphical work over a connection of less than 10Mbps.

RDP is no panacea. But, it is many times faster than X11-esque methods, most especially on lower bandwidth connections.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[CajunArson]

You're misinterpreting... I was agreeing with you about X fanboys who always cry about "network transparency" when X hasn't been network transparent for years & years. Any modern X server is just shooting bitmaps over a network link in a less efficient manner than RDP.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[rnturn]

Again... you show that you misunderstand how X works. It is the X client that is shooting bitmaps across the network. If you cannot get the terminology right, your arguments aren't going to be taken seriously.

And if an X application running on the client system is doing that, then, IMHO, the blame lies with the developer of the application and not X11. Perhaps it's the graphics libraries that have been employed for developing the X application that are the main source of all this inefficiency. My guess is that it's things like skins, themes, bizarre fonts, etc. that are probably the biggest reason that bitmaps have to be sent across the wire. It's wrong to blame X11 for developers using bitmaps when drawing objects. It's not X11's fault that developers have taken to using inefficient programming practices. Much like web developers that design web pages that are only rendered quickly when viewed on the same LAN as the server and load so slowly to be all but unviewable by users who don't live next door to the phone company's local office. Maybe having the developers work from home and have to see their work running in an environment similar to that encountered by the vast majority of the application users would have been helpful. I just think that throwing out the infrastructure because application developers got lazy or forgot to test their application in a realistic setting is the wrong solution.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[caseih]

I think what the poster was referring to is that client-side rendering is now the norm. This has brought us nice fonts and compositing, among other things. So yes, most X11 apps are just sending bitmaps to the server. No longer are modern X-based applications asking the server to render text and buttons and shapes for it. Yes this does decrease remote performance. And modern toolkits like GTK do require a lot of server round trips, which makes things hard to deal with over a high-latency link.

I remember running Xemacs over a modem and it ran great remotely, since it was mostly just asking the server to draw in its behalf. Worked very well, but compared to modern apps, was very ugly.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[serviscope_minor]

I think what the poster was referring to is that client-side rendering is now the norm.

Partly. Fonts are rendered client side, but can be composited server side just fine. Since X can cache bitmaps, a well written client will send the glyphs to the server as bitmaps, then send a list of bitmap IDs to composite. After the initial data dump it can go very fast.

And modern toolkits like GTK do require a lot of server round trips, which makes things hard to deal with over a high-latency link.

Frequently things like GTK do very strange, inexplicable things requiring far more round trips than necessary.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[organgtool]

And if an X application running on the client system is doing that, then, IMHO, the blame lies with the developer of the application and not X11.

So what you're saying is that X11 isn't network transparent, at least from the perspective of developers. And the example of inefficiency that you provided (drawing bitmaps) is something that all modern GUIs do extensively today. Your defense of X11 seems to be out of touch with the reality of modern GUI development. This is precisely why the people that actually do development on X11 or using X11 want a new graphics stack while the people that don't do any X11 development say that X is good enough.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[organgtool]

Excellent rebuttal! It was full of useful and informative facts to prove the OP wrong and definitely deserving of the upmod that it received.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[DarkOx]

Exactly - xedit, xclac, xvim, all work great over the slowest link you will find in use anywhere. The trouble is the world has moved on. I am not sure sending bit-maps ( regardless of how clever your scheme of sending just the changed parts, compress etc is ), is the right way to go but the fact is the X11 programs most people are using most of the time these days don't get the benefits of X11 server side rendering features.

Sending bit-maps be it X11 doing it, RDP, or VNC is certainly the simplest thing to do and it lets you display anything you want. Having clients send compressed postscript diffs possibly with some compositing, cursor, and clipboard extensions might be an interesting model; but how you go about dealing unpredictable motion like video playback would be real challenge.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[serviscope_minor]

What do you say to something like that?

It is blatantly, demonstrably false.

One of the primary designs of X is network transparency, and even 0.2 seconds with ssh -X shows it still is. Not only that, but the poster has spammed the entire thread saying X isn't netowrk transparent, much to the bemusement of people who use that feature.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ladies and Gentleman, step right up and meet one of the X fanboys you've heard so much about, king of the Linux assholes.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most users and developers really do use (and like) their modern toolkits and desktop environments. In those cases what CajunArson says is entirely correct. X is already just sending frames one by one, and does it horribly inefficently because it was designed for a very different use case.

Your claim is only correct if you only run motif-era apps. And that is just not relevant. Sorry.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[organgtool]

I think you have misunderstood the intent of the original post. The poster was not saying that X doesn't work over a network - as you have pointed out, anyone can easily prove that X technically works over a network. The point was that the efficiency of "network transparency" in X is no longer a reality. That is because the intent of X was that a request could be made to render a primitive, such as text, by providing a few parameters over X (networked or local) about the text that should be rendered and the result can be displayed with minimal protocol chatter. However, since many elements of modern GUIs use bitmaps for display elements, many of the transmissions over X are simply bitmap requests instead of requests to render X primitives. At that point, X is basically behaving like a glorified rootless VNC server - just sending a series of bitmap updates that can be costly over slow or high-latency networks. Perhaps the original poster should have said the "efficiency of network transparency" is no longer a reality to make the point a little clearer.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[CajunArson]

1. As I told another poster, Network Forwarding != Network Transparency. You know how modern X servers operate over a network? By pushing a bunch of bitmaps in a less-efficient manner than RDP. I really don't care if some dusty design document from 1985 says otherwise, you're irrational wishes don't create a new reality. Unless you are a real fossil, I was probably doing X forwarding before you even new what Linux was, and I know much much more about its limitations than you do.
2. If you're calling me a liar, you're also calling the main developers of the X server and Wayland liars because they agree with me and not with you.

If arrogance, ignorance, and disrespect for people who do hard work could be trasmuted into display server code, you would control the market!

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[Anonymous Coward]

The grandparent is correct though, and if you are going to go around badmouthing X you should at least get things correct. I greatly prefer RDP to X forwarding these days, yet I think some of the complaints about X are idiotic or wrong, if not just weird because there are other legitimate complaints. I guess that makes me a fanboy by your account though... fanboy of something I don't want to use and would like to see replaced...

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[serviscope_minor]

As I told another poster, Network Forwarding != Network Transparency.

OK, you're not a liar, you're just redefining commonly understood terms to confuse people. Fair play.

ou know how modern X servers operate over a network? By pushing a bunch of bitmaps

First yo umean xclients. And no, the cliend can still upload nice glyph bitmaps and then composite them using the bitmap IDs instead of using the old font mechanism, meaning the expensive bitmaps are sent once, not once per use.

Unless you are a real fossil, I was probably doing X forwarding before you even new what Linux was, and I know much much more about its limitations than you do.

Possibly, but the window is not enormous. I started with X in 94, and it debuted in 87. So I've been using it for 19 of it's 25 years in service.

2. If you're calling me a liar, you're also calling the main developers of the X server and Wayland liars because they agree with me and not with you.

Keith Packard is a bit of a FUD machine and seems to enjoyu setting up straw men along with making some very odd claims which are demonstrably false (a I've covered repeatedly). The fact that he's an X developer only means that his acts must be intentional, rather than through a lack of knowledge.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[wagnerrp]

No. What he's saying is that X11 is still perfectly network transparent, but that the clients are using the protocol in a manner that only works well over very high bandwidth, very low latency links, like a local socket. The only time network transparency goes away is when you're using extensions like SHM or DRM, which typically means you're doing things like video playback, games, or other intensive rendering; tasks which will never function well over slow, laggy links.

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[TheRaven64]

Drawing bitmaps is a broad statement - that's what every graphical application does and has always done since we started using raster displays instead of oscilloscopes for UIs - and it hides a lot of details. There are two important steps: rasterisation and compositing.

The first used to be done entirely on the server and is now done in the client. This hasn't changed from the perspective of an application developer, who says 'draw a line from x,y to x1,y1', but the library he calls now does this locally rather than calling xlib. This change largely happened for two reasons. The first is that X11 never got sensible antialised drawing primitives (e.g. a PS rendering model with antialiased bezier paths). Wayland doesn't have this either. The other is that CPUs became fast. One of the main reasons for wanting to do line drawing on the server was that rasterisation took up a huge amount of the CPU time if you did it purely in software and 2D accelerators (often sold as Windows accelerators, because they sped up typical GUIs) could do line drawing much faster.

The second, compositing, is what happens when you take a bunch of source images (text glyphs, controls, and so on) and combine them into a single image for display. This can be done entirely server-side on X11 and doing so over the network means that you keep the individual button images as textures on the GPU and do the compositing there. This is what most modern X11 toolkits do. I'm not 100% sure what Wayland exposes here, but I believe it only exposes this compositing at the window layer, whereas X lets you use it within the window. If you want to do hardware-accelerated composting in Wayland, you ask for a GLES context and do all of your rendering there (which, actually, isn't a bad idea these days, but is going to be horribly slow if you don't have GPU drivers).

Re:That You, Fanboy?

[organgtool]

What he's saying is that X11 is still perfectly network transparent, but that the clients are using the protocol in a manner that only works well over very high bandwidth, very low latency links, like a local socket.

So if you want your app to be reasonably usable over connections slower than LANs, you need to design your app in a very specific manner. That doesn't sound unreasonable, but it also doesn't sound transparent, which was my original point.

Unanswered questions...

[Junta]

Does this allow per-application forwarding? (All sorts of people blasting that Microsoft can do it, not many people speaking to whether *this* specific implementation can).

Does this allow remote applications to cleanly appear in things like notification areas? That was one problem I had with NX, even the rootless mode failed to properly incorporate that.

Does Wayland+FreeRDP provide a more unified approach to audio+video being grouped together? That's a large gap in X, where audio is consider just completely unrelated to the remoting...

Re:Unanswered questions...

[caseih]

I too eagerly await details.

X11 remoting is much more powerful than many people imagine. Like you say, it allows remote applications to display their icons in the local system tray. It also allows remote connections to communicate with locally-running apps. For example (and sometimes this behavior is not what I want!), running firefox on a remote machine will first check to see if there's an existing firefox instance on the X server running, and communicate with it to open the url. So on the remote machine I can click on a link that opens in a browser and have my locally-running browser pick that up.

Just recently I was testing out Fedora 18's version of Mate on a virtual machine. But I never bother with running the X on a virtual machine--that's just silly with X remoting--I just ssh in. I fired up mate-panel and it came up and displayed on my local machine over my own panel and loaded its own system tray and populated all the local apps icons right into its system tray. Pretty cool!

Finally, though it's less useful now with composited desktops, X11 does let you have a window manager running remotely.

X11 remoting does have many problems. First, round-trips make the latency prohibitive on a connection other than a LAN, especially for modern apps made using, say, GTK. NX tries to address this particular issue. Finally sound and local disk access to remote, and printing are not addressed at all. RDP does have a capability to do all that.

If Wayland's RDP can do many of these things (especially per-app remoting), then I do think it will finally possibly be an X11 replacement.

Re:Unanswered questions...

[serviscope_minor]

That's a large gap in X, where audio is consider just completely unrelated to the remoting...

That's a curious gap--espacially now. X11 is capable of forwarding pretty much arbitrary data. One could quite easily imagine a deamon which ships pulseaudio data over X11.

Or, alternatively, I assume that you could forward the pulseaudio port over ssh while you do X forwarding as well. I don't see why that wouldn't work. Of course you'd have to make sure that programs attempt to connect to the right pulse daemon.

Re:Unanswered questions...

[Anonymous Coward]

To add to that,

Does a GUI have to be running on the remote server?

I start many graphical programs from headless servers that have never had a gui running on them. If I have to run a full blown gui on the headless machine than this is still not a suitable replacement for X in this scenario.

Re:Unanswered questions...

[Anonymous Coward]

erm this works already, and is set up automatically (by the pulseaudio stuff).

ssh -X to your remote machine, and there will be env vars not only for your local X server, but also for your local pulseaudio server.

worked great last time I tried it.

Re:Unanswered questions...

[JesseMcDonald]

X11 remoting is much more powerful than many people imagine. Like you say, it allows remote applications to display their icons in the local system tray.

These days, most system tray icons are handled through DBUS, even under X11. Wayland probably won't bother with general client-to-client communication; instead, you'll forward your DBUS session alongside Wayland (and PulseAudio, CUPS, etc.) via a "ssh -X" equivalent which transparently handles all the details.

Re:Unanswered questions...

[serviscope_minor]

Mod parent up (if it's true). I've not tried it, but if it's correct then that's great.

Re:Unanswered questions...

[spitzak]

Does a GUI have to be running on the remote server?

No, the clients on the remote machine will be talking to a different Wayland server, one that only sends RDP to a remote display.

Yes there is special code running on the remote machine, but even X forwarding requires xlib and the code that translates a socket connection to actual network packets to be running on the remote machine. And modern programs require freetype and cairo and libpng and lots of other code that you think of as "GUI" running on the remote machine. X is not magical despite what some here seem to believe.

Re:X11 RDP

[h4rr4r]

RDP is truly impressive, but not everyone wants to have a desktop on their server.

Is it capable of letting me launch graphical applications from an OS without a local graphical display? I ask because my understanding is windows 2008 has added that as an option.

Re:X11 RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a second, you are trying to run a graphicall application from your server on another desktop one? What?

Mea Culpa

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Re:X11 RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

The big benefit of the X11 protocol is that you don't need to pull the full desktop. If I need a window each from multiple machines I don't need a desktop to go with it. That takes far too much space. I want to have a remote running application on my desktop. I don't want the remote desktop on mine.

If only someone invented X forwarding over some sort of socketing. A secure sort of course.

Re:X11 RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the added brainfuck of X11 remoting: what's the client and what's the server? The answer will probably surprise you...

Re:X11 RDP

[h4rr4r]

Yes, this is very common.

I have KVM installed on a server, I use virt-manager to play with it. I forward X over SSH to run virt-manager and have it display on my local machine. The server has no graphical output. You can feel free to substitute any program with a graphical output you like for virt-manager in my example.

In all its incarnations

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understood why sound on Linux was kept separate from X

Re:In all its incarnations

[Anonymous Coward]

Because not everything is a desktop computer.

Re:In all its incarnations

[armanox]

Best guess: X is a display protocol, not audio.

Re:In all its incarnations

[jedidiah]

> I never understood why sound on Linux was kept separate from X

X is older than gaming PCs.

There are still a lot of remote desktop use cases where lack of sound support is pretty much irrelevant. Actually, I would go further and say that sound on a remote desktop is more likely than not COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT.

Most use cases that call for sound support stretch the abilities of ANY remote desktop implementation.

Re:In all its incarnations

[unixisc]

Does Wayland include support for sound in the overall protocol, or is that still separate?

sounds good

[ssam]

sounds like a nice improvement. as long as:
* The interface is still the same. i.e. i ssh -X in to a machine, start a graphical program (evince or whatever), and it displays locally. I dont want to have to configure stuff, or start some additional server on the remote machine.
* It works in mixed environments. I might be running wayland on my laptop next year. but some of the machines i log into a currently on Scientific Linux 5. I guess RHEL 7 will still be X11 based and i would not make bets about RHEL8.

Also this will score double bonus points if it works with gnu screen. i.e. i ssh into a machine, start screen, start a tunnelled graphical app. drop the network connection, or suspend, or switch to a different machine, and it re-attaches the graphical app.

Be careful what you wish for...

[stoploss]

As long as I'm guaranteed that my local display can talk to remote applications, no matter what the flavor of the month is, I'll be happy. There needs to be a universal standard.

You do realize you probably prompted some brain-addled dev someplace to come up with the equivalent of PulseAudio for display technology, right?

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection—except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.
—David Wheeler

Re:Be careful what you wish for...

[jedidiah]

We already have some brain-addled dev someplace trying to come up with the display equivalent of Pulse Audio.

We're all talking about it right now: It's called Wayland.

+...or did I miss your sarc tag?

Re:Be careful what you wish for...

[wagnerrp]

What do you think X itself is? Pulseaudio is a sound server, allowing multiple sound sources to be multiplexed in software against one or more sound outputs, for outputs without the capability to perform hardware multiplexing. Xorg is a display server, allowing multiple image sources to be multiplexed in software against one or more display outputs. If you want to get really specific, you can reference the AIGLX extension for allowing the same thing to be done for OpenGL applications.

Re:Be careful what you wish for...

[stoploss]

Ah, but you aren't thinking degenerately enough. Have you seen the Pulse Audio diagram? ALSA is a source *and* a sink in the PulseAudio abstraction layer—what a great design!

In the spirit of PulseAudio, I imagine a typical Unix design approach for a de novo "universal" framework to allow application remoting would be a meta-layer on *top* of both X and Wayland (and/or any other framework that comes along). And, for platform portability, it could render widgets using Java Swing.

...or something appallingly insane like that.

Re:Be careful what you wish for...

[Blaskowicz]

Sound cards have both inputs and outputs? Oh, the horror!

RDP ranks as the best protocol

[DigiShaman]

Aside from one major security vulnerability (Microsoft Security Bulletin MS12-020), RDP has been rock solid and secure. But perhaps most interesting is that it performs the best. I've tried just about all the major remote desktop protocols out there. VNC, LogMeIn, WebEx, GoToMyPC, TeamViewer. None of them compare to RDP in terms of responsiveness and ability to hold up under excessive gateway saturation of an ISP connection.

Re:RDP ranks as the best protocol

[Anonymous Coward]

All very nice solutions for throwing a full-blown desktop across the network, but the people who want to do that aren't complaining. We are the people who want to throw many small (graphically) applications from many separate machines (many of which do not have desktop environments or window managers installed) across the network and display them all on one local machine, not host a webinar or something. It looks like RDP is able to do that, but until I test it for myself I won't be sure.

Re:RDP ranks as the best protocol

[armanox]

You realize you only mentioned VNC and services that use VNC as things you've tried, right? And VNC is very inefficient compared to just about anything (X over network, ssh -CX, RDP, NX, etc)

Re:RDP ranks as the best protocol

[DigiShaman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_remote_desktop_software

VNC protocol is RFB(VNC)
LogMeIn protocol is proprietary
WebEx protocol is proprietary
GoToMyPc protocol is proprietary
Team Viewer is proprietary

Unless you know something I don't, VNC is VNC. The other's I've mentioned are *not* related to VNC at all.

Well, frankly

[AdmV0rl0n]

No fucking wonder Linux on the desktop has failed. I'm looking at Wayland on youtube and it looks..... unready. The windows have no bordering. The applications are jerky. Applications are crashing. I've used X, and multiple windows managers, and I use all the remote tech out there, from NX, VNC, through to RDP. And given the educated commentry, X is more complete, only because its older. And its a somewhat cleaned up mess.

What a crap shoot. What a mess.

Re:Well, frankly

[Anonymous Coward]

No fucking wonder Linux on the desktop has failed. I'm looking at Wayland on youtube and it looks..... unready.

Erm.. that's because it is "unready." Wayland has nothing to do with "Linux on the desktop" because it isn't and has never been used except by Wayland developers. It makes no sense to look at Wayland and then conclude that "no wonder" desktop Linux has "failed."

Re:Well, frankly

[Microlith]

Ah yes, the ever intelligent commentary on Slashdot.

What video did you watch? Was it made within the last few months? You do realize (if the video is covering Weston) that Weston is not only new but also a reference implementation and not intended for production use, right?

This has not a goddamn thing to do with why "Linux on the desktop has failed."

Re:Well, frankly

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll -- at least I hope it was, you managed to get quite a few misconceptions in one post.

Just in case it wasn't:
* Wayland is only a compositor protocol, and a library implementing the protocol.
* Actual compositor you can test is Weston
* youtube is not how you review compositor protocols or even reference compositors
* borders are not handled by either Wayland or Weston
* "X is more complete" -- not really, not in the sense that it's seriously lacking in areas where linux is nowadays used. But yes in the sense that X does a _lot_ things that 99.99% of the users have not needed in over ten years. For the last years the X developers (many of them same guys who work on Wayland) have been removing massive amounts of X code just because it's become an unmaintainable mess that no-one wants to touch in fear of breaking it: I think it was Keith Packard who joked that the X deprecation policy is to remove any features that have been accidentally broken for over a year without anyone complaining...

Re:X11 RDP

[EvilSS]

Just guessing here, but I'd imagine 10^6 $100 bills are more convenient than 10^8 $1 bills.

Re:X11 RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, a single bill is approximately 1 gram, so that's approximately 1000 kg in $100 bills. Not convenient at all, even neglecting volume.

Besides, no doubt it is all in massless, abstract data bits. Unless, of course, you count the additional mass of a full hard drive vs. an empty one... haha.

Re:X11 RDP

[jedidiah]

Sounds like a conventional Windows application installer, doesn't it?

Never wanted to install software from some 3rd party proprietary vendor? It's not like Free Software where you can just integrated it into some yum or apt repository.

Plus you're basically stuck dealing with whatever the vendor wants to give you.

Re:X11 RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly all I use X for. I felt dirty for putting a windowing system on a server, but the payoff in ease of use was worth it.

Actual Information from the FreeRDP Project

[awakecoding]

Hi, I am Marc-Andre Moreau, founder and leader of the FreeRDP project. I was not directly involved with the FreeRDP Wayland backend. First, definitely take this backend as a first step. There is a *lot* more than can be done in the future, and I can tell you it has the potential to make your best dreams come true in terms of remote desktop. Here is a screencast I took about a month ago showing FreeRDP on Linux connecting to Windows 8 with RemoteFX, playing videos with sound smoothly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUF8xPKBQJM Even if this is impressive at this point, it is just a fraction of what we're going after in the future. RemoteFX was introduced in RDP 7.1, and is what FreeRDP implements. It basically encodes everything on-the-fly for fast encoding on the server and fast decoding on the client. This means the videos played in that remote desktop session I've recorded are re-encoded to RemoteFX, they are not sent as H264. RDP also provides a functionality allowing the redirection of the compressed video stream for local decoding and playback, but from experience RemoteFX provides a better user experience. RDP may be a protocol designed by Microsoft, it is part of the Microsoft Open Specifications. The long term goal of the project is not to make it a "FreeRDP to Microsoft" technology, but really to make it a "FreeRDP to FreeRDP" technology, where high quality clients and servers will be available for all platforms in existence. Like it or not, RDP is an extremely powerful protocol that has all the potential necessary to compete with leading commercially-supported alternatives, except that this one is open specification and open source with FreeRDP. We are also considering the possibility of defining our own community extensions to the RDP protocol to fill in the gaps left by Microsoft. We currently have clients on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS. We have servers (still in their early stage) on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and now Wayland. All of this is available under the Apache license. One common mistake about RDP is to compare only in terms of the core feature set, which is graphics remoting and input. RDP provides support for disk redirection, audio input and output redirection, multimedia redirection, smartcard redirection, printer redirection, usb device redirection, multitouch input, serial & parallel device redirection, etc. It has a very rich set of security features which we work very hard on supporting well (Network Level Authentication, TS Gateway, etc). As for graphics remoting, it is very elaborate in the RDP protocol, and it just keeps getting better with newer versions of the protocol. The next step for us is to jump on RDP8 support, which will bring many new features such as a progressive graphics codec, dynamic adaptation based on changing network conditions, a high performance codec for anti-aliased fonts, support for multitransport (TCP + UDP), enhanced support for WAN and higher-latency/low bandwith environments, etc. All of this can be brought to all platforms with the FreeRDP project, for the benefit of all. Brace yourselves, FreeRDP is coming.

Re:Actual Information from the FreeRDP Project

[CajunArson]

THAT IS USELESS! You didn't show forwarded Xterms using the exact same perfect protocol that was cool in 1985! Your system is obviously bloated and inefficient compared to X11 and a complete waste of time!! /sarcasm

Much more seriously, thank you very much for your hard work and for pushing forward with implementing this technology in an open & cross-platform way. The video is fantastic!

Re:Actual Information from the FreeRDP Project

[pkphilip]

Wow! great stuff. Thanks a lot for all your work. You guys kick ass [insert picture of Marc-Andre Moreau kicking donkey here].

Re:Actual Information from the FreeRDP Project

[strikethree]

It basically encodes everything on-the-fly for fast encoding on the server and fast decoding on the client.

Hm. Video encoding on the fly? Is it done on the CPU? If so, how much CPU does it take?

Re:X11 RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a reason that you aren't using a more standard exponential notation, ie. $10^8?

You mean a standard exponential notation... like Engineering notation?

X11 does. Therefore it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're going to complain it's slower over the network. But then again, no display is going to manage that.

Either pointless or wrong. Pick.

remote sound

[smartfart]

I haven't tried this, but jack is a networked sound protocol... it should be possible to export that to your end of a remote session.

RDP is king

[pak9rabid]

This is great news and solves the long-standing question about how Wayland was going to handle remote clients in an acceptable manner.

Re:X11 RDP

[ratboy666]

But... the grandparent poster DIDN'T put a windowing system on the server!

virt-manager is a pretty simple X client, and the GUI is solely on your workstation. No GUI on the server at all. And, if that's what YOU do, you also don't have a GUI on the server:

[myworkstation] $ ssh -X myname@myserver
[myserver] $ virt-manager ... and virt-manager appears in a window on your workstation.

clicky, clicky, happy.

Folks - that's ALL there is to it. Except... myserver can be something completely different - A Solaris box, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX.

But, we get farther away... The Solaris application that has it's display on my workstation cannot use notifications (which should have been designed as an X extension, but the kids didn't know...). XBell seems to be deprecated. Without hackery, the xterm (that may be running on that AIX box) can't make a sound on my workstation (using that newfangled "pulse" thing). It can be hacked to work, though.

RDP? Will that help me? Probably not -- I don't log in to a single system that supports RDP.

Local X clients on my workstation can do fancier stuff, off course. But all the applications render to my X server, and the compositing happens locally, anyway. My Solaris and AIX X applications can push bitmaps, but they generally don't. Those applications really don't care.

The biggest problems with X today? Notifications. Other crap that uses other inter-application communications (like DBUS) instead of X. Deprecation of XBell. Network sound that is far too complicated.

If it takes "Wayland" to solve this, make sure that there is a simple proxy that can easily be deployed that lets me use those X applications. However, that doesn't fix my X issues, and just adds an additional layer.

How does this stack up? About the same as if I run an X Server (say Hummingbird, or Cygwin) on a Windows workstation. Interesting, that...the PRIMARY reason I (personally) run Linux as a workstation OS is to allow me to use an X Server as my primary display.

If that were not the case, I would just leave Windows (whatever version) on my workstation, and start from there.

Well... that and being able to simply recompile my code to run on the workstation or the servers as appropriate. I generally use Tk as a GUI for applications anyway (at least for one-off apps).

Still not the same

[markdavis]

Sorry, this will NOT directly replace all you can do with X11. Not by a long shot.

Re:X11 RDP

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that's amusing. I am an engineer and I have never heard of that.

Lots of new info, some frightening

[fikx]

I liked Daniel's video. It provided more detail about X than I've seen from any Wayland link so far and cleared up a lot about Wayland to finally get me interested in it's development. Daniel in particular is the first person I've seen talking about Wayland that I'm interested in listening to since he actually knows facts and can communicate them well as well as have a great attitude about what he's doing
That said, and I know I'm biased in favor of X, I'm very disappointed in the solution to all the problems in X11 that he detailed. Due to issues with how X handles it's job, the solution has been for years to let the client fix it at their end and use very little of X. Avoid fixing X. The Wayland solution sounds like take that work around and build a new display around it. Not encouraging.
From his description I agree: the X11 code cannot be fixed. But, my impression is that as coders/developers they applied a coders take to the problem and came up with a coders solution: Take the code written app-side as a work around and build a design on it. Reverse engineer a design based on code that exists. That sounds really negative and I know that will raise some bile, especially since the standard answer is "if you think they are wrong, code it yourself". Based on that video, there's no way I could code at his level so there's no ground for me to stand on there.
What makes me comment on this topic is that I like the X11 design/architecture and feel strongly it is more useful now than the alternatives (RDP/VNC/etc.) and will be more useful as time goes on. I would like a designers solution in that fix the design, then work towards getting that design coded. From the sound of things, that would mean dumping backwards compatibility with X11 protocol, but I would still rather loose X to a better design than loose it to what I see in the Wayland design. Unfortunately those who would be able to handle that kind of development look to be focused elsewhere...

Re:X11 RDP

[Grishnakh]

yum and apt aren't restricted to Free software; there's proprietary software that uses these (at least apt, not sure about yum) to maintain themselves too. A couple of examples are Opera and Google Talk.