Enlightenment E20 Released With Full Wayland Support (enlightenment.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Enlightenment DR 0.20 has been released. The most significant change is full Wayland support where E20 can act as its own Wayland compositor and the whole shebang. Enlightenment 0.20 also has better FreeBSD support, introduces Geolocation support, new screen management, and other changes.

Comments

Re:w007

[Junta]

X11 primitives are admittedly suboptimal for state of the art, but the concern is that recent state of the art remote desktop implementations have been a bit negligent of the 'seamless' facet.

For example, using X11 remoting, little things like notification area and such 'just happen'. Frequently other strategies say 'remote desktop' and dust their hands of making it seamlessly sit in the local display.

Now X11 itself does not do this fully (audio notably is not in scope) or best (X11 primitives aren't interesting, puts client at risk of crash if network issue...). A better approach is to hook things like NETWM as a window manager and the graphics via compositor (a la xpra). Such a strategy wouldn't care one bit about X11. Once upon a time the argument would have been that the facet of having the communication path be abstracted to be network or other paths was important, but compositing created a convenient interception point to make the concern theoretically moot).

The issue is what is popularized. VNC, RDP, and vanilla X11 are the well known examples. Xpra does it right, but no one has heard of Xpra. Even though Xpra's approach would be fully Wayland compatible, it has 'X' in the name and as-yet hasn't bothered with Wayland compatibility, so the knowledge the approach would be portable is not out there. RDP I believe is more capable, but most commonly people experience RDP to a desktop or a 'normal' server, and as such the seamless case isn't presented. So X11 is the *only* thing that people know as ubiquitous and seamless and as such are understandably skeptical about alternatives.

So what needs to be done is for someone to port Xpra or implement something similar and to popularize it. Right now those who understand the technology know how it *could* be done even better than normal X11, but there's a shortage of actual implementation catering to those concerns. There's a lot of 'well, just use freerdp' or 'real applications should be web enabled anyway for remote use', and not enough 'here's a concrete and authoritative seamless remote strategy that fits in with the strategy'.