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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."
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.
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.
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.