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LibreOffice Ported To Run On Wayland
An anonymous reader writes: LibreOffice has lost its X11 dependency on Linux and can now run smoothly under Wayland. LibreOffice has been ported to Wayland by adding GTK3 tool-kit support to the office suite over the past few months. LibreOffice on Wayland is now in good enough shape that the tracker bug has been closed and it should work as well as X11 except for a few remaining bugs. LibreOffice 5.0 will be released next month with this support and other changes outlined by the 5.0 release notes.
This statement is fundamentally crap. Every day I run multiple kde 4 applications on multiple systems back to a single desktop with ssh. The applications are not degraded and I don't have to disable any X11 features to do it. Occasionally I even use OpenGL applications remotely and they perform just fine.
But something is better than nothing. Currently wayland is only offering the latter.
Your comment is two years out of date, Wayland has offered remote protocol since 2013 in the main branch, further its expected to be better supported than X11 (ie perfect alpha blending on shading at 60fps over a network link) all while using less resources than X11 and without degrading features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Beside your tone, you also missed the point. X11 is a graphical terminal technology where an application sends UI draw information to a server which renders it into graphic memory which is finally displayed on a screen. All input is collected and transmitted to the application. The server understands a simple protocol based on graphical primitives including fonts. In later years the font feature got extended, but the principle was not violated by that extension. The problem started when people wanted to use 3D and watch videos. Also audio was outside of the scope of X11 and of course printing. The addition of video required direct hardware access to be fast enough (especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s). Therefore, stuff like DRI where realized, which broke with the X11 principle that an application sends drawing information to the server which then does all the graphic stuff.
I hope that clears things up.
Sure, remote desktop rocks. But they also are superior to X. For example, if your network connection burps, you don't lose your f'in work. Because the app runs locally and is displayed remotely and is completely independent on the network.
Sure remote X is great, I use it all the time. But I'm also aware that if I start a long-running process, I need to use screen to keep it alive, because now I'm depending on three things - the Linux machine hosting the app, the network, and my desktop PC showing me the app. That's a recipe for fragility in the whole thing.
Perhaps you don't use remote X for things that take hours to run, or don't mind losing all your work because you forgot to save and now the network connection reset. That's fine and great. But some people do, and really, X is pretty deficient compared to the rest of the remote desktop protocols out there. Even VNC.
Remote X is great, but it's time to modernize it and put features that every other remote desktop system has.
As an actual user, not just a developer talking about protocols try actually setting that up and using it. Supposedly that code is in the main branch but there is ZERO documentation about how to make it work. From what I have heard one of the developers wrote it in order to try to shut up all the people who were rightly complaining that a major feature from X was being taken away. Once he had a single demo it then went by the wayside. Does that code even work any more? Who knows, how would one even find out?
As far as I can tell remote Wayland was developed only far enough to be a publicity stunt and doesn't really exist in a usable state.