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First Steps Towards Network Transparency For Wayland (phoronix.com)

munwin99 writes: For the longest time, when bringing up Wayland a recurring question was 'what about network transparency?!' Well, Samsung's Derek Foreman has today published the set of Wayland patches for providing Wayland network transparency by pushing the Wayland protocol over TCP/IP.

154 comments

  1. Seriously?? by brunes69 · · Score: 0

    I seriously doubt that network transparency is at the top of anyones mind. It is 2016. If you want headless remote desktop availability you have a plethora of cross-platform options at your fingertips.

    1. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What people want is ssh -X and yes it is a top priority to many.

    2. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And yet, every time the subject of Wayland comes up, you can expect that at least 25% of the posts here will be concerning network transparency or their responses.

    3. Re:Seriously?? by dos1 · · Score: 1

      That's why it wasn't considered when the protocol has been designed (and rightfully so), but it's great to see it as a later addition.

      I have never used network transparency in X for any significant purpose, but it was great for quick hacks, especially when I had a smartphone running X.

    4. Re:Seriously?? by bakaorg · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Personally, I would never use any windowing system by choice that did *not* have network transparency. Non-local VMs and applications with specific hardware requirements or physical attachments are the biggest (as specific examples that I have used *today*). I use VNC heavily (including KVM-to-VNC for boot level interactions with systems) but that is no overall solution since it doesn't give you integrated desktops usually (copy-paste, breaking out each remote window into a local window, etc).

      I'd certainly accept something like (I currently use it) NX (No-Machine's X) when run in rootless mode. That works decently well for allowing remote GUIs to behave more or less like they were local.

    5. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      ssh -X is seriously is the slowest shit. Barely usable on a 100 megabit LAN even with compression enabled.

    6. Re:Seriously?? by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 0, Troll

      "Many" people in a tiny minority.

    7. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Those who need to launch graphical software on remote linux systems.

    8. Re:Seriously?? by Sax+Russell+5449D29A · · Score: 0

      If you need to use X sessions over LAN (let alone WAN...), you're doing something wrong.

      --
      -SR
    9. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      VNC is JPEG rubbish.

      I want to run an APP on a SERVER and Displayed on my client machine. I do nto want the entire fuckign desktop as JPEG motion picture with LEGO type blocks.

    10. Re:Seriously?? by gtwrek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I concur. VMs, embedded hardware, headless machines- I'm on them all day. And ssh -X is all that I need working for my environment. As long as that works, everything else just is seamless. I think we're not going to see a reduction in VM's. And the number/amount of embedded hardware's only growing.

      Now, X certainly has ugly warts. I'm hopeful for what Wayland's offering. This network transparency patch for Wayland sounds like a great start.

      --Mark

    11. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ssh -X is seriously is the slowest shit. Barely usable on a 100 megabit LAN even with compression enabled.

      Your basement stuffed full of old Pentium 3 boxes does not count.

    12. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      You do not use a full session, but often need to launch small applications without disturbing the normal use of the remote machine. For example it could be the software manager of the distro, or a specialized software only available on a particular machine (for example because it has a hardlock key, or it does not run on the operating system you are using on you main workstation).

    13. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL. That's the funniest thing I've read this week.

    14. Re:Seriously?? by Arkh89 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I do, why am I wrong?
      Typical usage : I log onto distant machine, start working in command line (vim, python, matlab -nodesktop), then at some point I will need to display a couple of graphs or images. That's a relatively small graphical payload for which I *do not* want to use VNC. With ssh -X I get the windows to be displayed locally just as if I was doing the work on my light-weight terminal.

    15. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL. I stand corrected. THIS is the funniest thing I've read this week.

    16. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unfortunately, many without any experience decided that since their myopic world view excludes such use cases then such use cases need never exist. This mentality is the central to the "Wayland-way."

      Network transparency is the single biggest obstacle Wayland has ignored and it is the single biggest reason it has never gathered critical mass. Should they seriously address this issue and create a solid, viable, solution, Wayland will find near universal support. All knowledgeable users acknowledge X has warts and hasn't aged well. But a solid, wart ridden solution which continues to work is far, far better than an unproven, half solution, all day, every day of the week.

    17. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm always entertained by those who believe that because they don't need something, no one has the need for it.

      Those of us in the VLSI field are heavily dependent on network transparency. A typical environment involves a cluster of machines running some type of grid software (LSF or Sun Grid Engine). Jobs are submitted to the cluster, and the grid software chooses a machine to run the job on. At any given time, a user may have anywhere from 1 to 20 or more jobs running, each potentially on a different machine. With X's network transparency, it is not necessary to run 20 different VNC sessions on specific machines, which would be entirely impractical (especially considering that you may have hundreds of CPUs on which your job may run.)

    18. Re:Seriously?? by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 0

      Yes, a tiny minority of people. In fact, many Linux applications can't even be launched that way and next-to-no-one cares.

    19. Re:Seriously?? by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 3, Funny

      ssh -X is seriously is the slowest shit. Barely usable on a 100 megabit LAN even with compression enabled.

      Your basement stuffed full of old Pentium 3 boxes does not count.

      That's my living room!

      It just LOOKS like a basement.

      --
      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
    20. Re:Seriously?? by Sax+Russell+5449D29A · · Score: 1

      It's mostly in reference to "top priority" and "majority". There are some niche use cases of course, but in general it's only useful for some random ad hoc stuff.

      --
      -SR
    21. Re:Seriously?? by Trogre · · Score: 1

      I haven't found a better way to persistently run remote graphical programs than with X11 via xpra.

      What do you suggest instead? VNC? RDP?

      --
      "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
    22. Re:Seriously?? by caseih · · Score: 1

      RDP indeed is a very good protocol. It's very fast, much faster than X11 forwarding, and can forward files, printers, and sounds across the link. Typically it's faster than VNC too. At one time there was talk about making a wayland module that would use RDP as the underlying protocol to remote Wayland windows and applications across the network. This actually makes more sense to me than forwarding the wayland protocol itself. RDP can do per-app forwarding (like we're used to on Linux), or the full desktop.

    23. Re:Seriously?? by caseih · · Score: 3

      Are you serious? It's 2016 and the rage is cloud computing with distributed virtual machines and containers all running programs. You better believe remoting and network transparency is in demand, and actually essential. Apps could be local in a docker container or on the cloud. All interfaced on a laptop or tablet together seamlessly. Really it's the old 1990s Sun vision actually materializing.

    24. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I use VMs, embedded hardware, and headless machines all day too, but only ever use ssh.

      What apps are you throwing back to your workstation?

    25. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which applications?

      Since my local system isn't Linux (currently a Mac), this has been the way I run GUI apps on Linux for about a decade. Before that, when my main machine ran Linux too, it wasn't much different.

    26. Re:Seriously?? by whoever57 · · Score: 1

      I seriously doubt that network transparency is at the top of anyones mind. It is 2016. If you want headless remote desktop availability you have a plethora of cross-platform options at your fingertips.

      You have never administered a really stripped-down server, have you?

      If you think that you have, then you don't know the meaning of "really stripped-down".

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    27. Re:Seriously?? by swb · · Score: 1

      Seriously, if they ever want to make it the year of Linux on the desktop they would adopt RDP as the protocol (as in compatible with mstsc.exe). It'd be a massive potential userbase of people running windows who could be immediate users of free software. I could see virtual desktops as a mass-market business, not the niche corporate Citrix/TS/VDI thing it is now.

      I always wonder why I don't make my own dekstop a VM and quit customizing or even caring if the actual machines I connect from do anything other than run the remote access client well.

    28. Re:Seriously?? by Fwipp · · Score: 1

      What "really stripped-down server" were you working on that you needed to launch graphical applications to administer it?

      A "really stripped-down server" is, to me, a server without vi or nano.

    29. Re: Seriously?? by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 1

      Yes, that "random ad hoc" stuff is called the capabilities of the computer environment. Kind of like reading CDs and USB keys. Most people most of the time don't do it, but I don't think you want to pull those bits out of the kernel. Other than a tiny minority of technical users, most people don't write C code either. Should we drop the C compiler from the standard Linux environment too? Why not go whole horse and just use Windows? No compiler, no remote terminal, no native nothing without third-party add-ons. Just because most of your friends aren't capable of taking the full advantage of a Linux machine with x11 doesn't mean you get to piss all over it and fuck it up for the rest of us.

    30. Re: Seriously?? by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 0

      I won't. 1 the team has no credibility because of their many years long opposition to network transparency and 2 whatever product they do churn out won't be as known and as debugged/understood X is. X has a 30 year lead on them. Any one of those in isolation and they might have stood a chance like if they didn't have network transparency but were also mature tech, or if they were new but started with a goal to replicate all existing X functionality. Both new and contrary is a no go in a domain where things need to just work without surprises.

    31. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      There are so many reasons why VNC is actually a *superior* way to run graphical software remotely that it isnt even worth discussing.

      You, sir, win at being a fool. VNC is a horrid abomination. It sends bitmaps of changed screen areas. What is possibly superior about that?

      X sends drawing primitives (draw rectangle here, draw button there, etc). Assuming the remote end is able to render those primitives it can actually be a very efficient protocol. Now, most L-users want the shiny and bitmap-rendered gradients with OpenGL transparency, etc. That is difficult to send as a series of primitives. Remote OpenGL support kind of works if you can run an X server that supports it.

      Technologies like NX do a fantastic job of breaking the drawing down to cacheable sections. I am sitting on the slow-end of a remote link to my desktop at work as I write this and it is almost as good as being there. Latency is a bit of a bitch, but rendering and update speeds are awesome. I just wish that NX/X2GO supported GL better so that I could run the same desktop remotely as I do locally.

      Microsoft does almost as good with RDP. I'm quite impressed with that even though it's a Microsoft abomination.

    32. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You do realize that the Wayland guys are also the core Xorg developers? They came up with Wayland because they realized X is not fixable.

    33. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FreeRDP provides a server and client with Wayland support.

      http://www.freerdp.com

    34. Re: Seriously?? by Sax+Russell+5449D29A · · Score: 1

      SSH with X11 forwarding isn't what many people consider top priority. The majority most likely go either full headless or full desktop. Everything in-between is likely to be an ad hoc solution to a problem that needs to be either headless or have proper remote desktop capabilities.

      But nobody was talking about dropping the capability, that's plain stupid. Even though I use floppy disks only approximately once every two years and I don't regard it as a top priority feature, it doesn't mean I want the support for floppies dropped. However, it also doesn't mean it should be used e.g. as a data backup solution in a production environment.

      X11 forwarding as a good-to-have option and as a doing-something-wrong method can exist at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive.

      --
      -SR
    35. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      We do it ALL THE TIME where I work. We'll ssh from our Windows machines into the lab, do what we need, and if we need to open qtcreator or gedit or whatever, we'll run it and X-Win32 will serve it locally. VNC would mean importing a sluggish whole desktop which isn't required and given it's all bitmapped screen grabs will never be as fast as a locally rendered GUI, which is what X servers are designed to do.

      FFS, so many people in this thread are totally ignorant about how X can be used and is used by people in the field. No wonder Linux is going to shit in certain areas - the lessons of the past are being forgotten.

    36. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Word.

    37. Re: Seriously?? by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 1

      There are a dozen use cases for not full headless and not full desktop. I'll name you one: a laboratory workstation that you both physically sit at and occasionally check up on from your desk or your home by sshing in and running a graphical thingie to monitor to test equipment it's plugged into.

    38. Re: Seriously?? by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 1

      And guess what: they did it wrong because they dropped a feature lots of people liked and use as part of their workflow.

    39. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here's a word about "top priority". I don't use X forwarding over SSH very often, but when I want it, it's really great to have. Wayland, I always, said, would be incomplete if it didn't offer network transparency a la X, but I've been quite willing for the implementers work out the basic things in Wayland before tackling network transparency. So there--it wasn't top priority for me. I was willing to see some of what it could do.

      On the other hand, I won't consider it done until they get that network-transparency thing worked out--and better than the wonkiness in X's memory-mapped extensions.

    40. Re:Seriously?? by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      And yet you can't be bothered to name at least one of them.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    41. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      SSH with X11 forwarding isn't what many people consider top priority. The majority most likely go either full headless or full desktop. Everything in-between is likely to be an ad hoc solution to a problem that needs to be either headless or have proper remote desktop capabilities.

      I don't know about the "likely majority"; but maybe you should research it.

      I do know there are quite a few people who do use X11 forwarding. I do know that sometimes that just works so much better:
      * alt-tab between different applications on different machines
      * viewing two machines next to each other for reference (both data, and different architectures)
      * cut-and-paste

      VNC doesn't let the remote desktop interact with the local desktop. It displays it, but it doesn't interact with it.

    42. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hmm let's see

      IDV
      VAPOR
      Vis5D
      for a start a little plot_wrf_maps thrown in then maybe a little AWIPS-ii (AKA NMAP)

    43. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ..I have never used network transparency in X for any significant purpose,

      Well, a lot of us do

      ...but it was great for quick hacks, especially when I had a smartphone running X.

      come back when you've had time to play with a bunch of linux/*BSD remote (n miles away, not just upstairs from our dark, dank basements...although it proves useful there too) servers and control boxes..

      Some of us have been using this transparency on a daily basis for years, well...decades, well...a quarter of a fscking century.

    44. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's mostly in reference to "top priority" and "majority". There are some niche use cases of course, but in general it's only useful for some random ad hoc stuff.

      The niche cases being workplaces as opposed to the glorified linux desktop typewriter/gaming station. There are a lot of people out there hating windows because you always pull the full desktop via RDP which sucks if you have to remote to more than one machine. With X you just pull a single window in your local environment and you are fine. Just another regression by who go desktop first instead of listening and getting both with minimal overhead.

    45. Re: Seriously?? by silanea · · Score: 2

      Why not go whole horse and just use Windows? [...N]o remote terminal [...]

      For extra laughs, Microsoft is actually working on that. Even Redmond has finally understood why some features are essential to an ecosystem even when only a handful of users need them.

      --
      Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
    46. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      SSH with X11 forwarding isn't what many people consider top priority. The majority most likely go either full headless or full desktop. Everything in-between is likely to be an ad hoc solution to a problem that needs to be either headless or have proper remote desktop capabilities.

      The majority of people don't know what's possible and what they are missing because they are pretty much self taught and never ever learned from others because they believe they already know everything. You don't need full remote desktops ever except for feeling familiar with them. For remote work it is much more work efficient to blend the remote desktop into your local one, because you often enough have to work at both (or more) places at the same time and full sized desktops just take too much space. The only time I really want to see a full remote desktop is if I can't figure out what the hell he is doing wrong at his station, but in this case I also want to see him push the mouse, etc. and then it's teamviewer time.

      If you need to pull a full desktop instead of a single application window you aren't really flexible and your workflow has room for improvement.

    47. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The majority most likely go either full headless or full desktop.

      When corporate requires Outlook, that full desktop is Windows. Then one uses remote X for everything else.

      No, VNC is not an alternative, as it can not forward windows, only the entire desktop. Which interferes with things like switching between Windows (including Outlook), and getting the outlook notifications in the (currently visible) systray.

    48. Re:Seriously?? by ssam · · Score: 1

      "ssh -X" works fine on wayland. Install Fedora 23, start a wayland session and try it. (Ok, it starts up an xwayland server underneath, but from a user point of view it works indistinguishably)

    49. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The protocol was designed to make it basically impossible.

      Each program is responsible its own window decorations. Because a Window that can't even be minimized when it's busy was so much fun in Windows 3.11. Each program is responsible for it's own keymapping. Because each program doing things a little different is so much better than a consistent environment where everything works the same. Everything is pixels, rather than graphics primitives, just like BMP is so much more modern than that old SVG stuff.

      And of course designed to take full advantage of 3D acceleration, so make sure you have a good graphics card. Two if you're a gamer, and don't want your gaming performance to have less than 100% of one card. Because everybody loved the performance of Windows Vista. Oh, and if you have one of those 3D drivers that sometimes locks up (i.e. all of them), losing everything is so much better that killing the game and still being able to use everything else (including saving any open files), because only the game needs those pesky 3D drivers (yes, X compositors have the same problem, if you choose to install them, but that's your choice).

    50. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Network transparency is the single biggest obstacle Wayland has ignored

      Oh, they haven't ignored it. Read the article, he lists a bunch of reasons why network transparency is hard to do in Wayland, and why half the stuff isn't working yet. Every single one of them is a bad idea even on a system that doesn't need network transparency (basically anything that contains the words "client side" results in everything being inconsistent, and client side window decorations makes sure that you can't minimize a busy window). Yet, all these design decisions make perfect sense, if you factor in that Wayland from the beginning was designed to make network transparency impossible.

    51. Re: Seriously?? by jouassou · · Score: 2

      Simple use case. I mostly program in Fortran these days, but I often use Matlab for smaller things. What i do then, is instead of installing the 6GB of Matlab and all its toolboxes on my poor laptop, I have it installed on my work computer. I then ssh in, use 'matlab -nodesktop' to start an interpreter, and use it interactively. Every time i use a plotting command, the plot window pops up nearly instantly on my laptop. I'm not interested in using VNC, because first of all it would be inefficient to forward the entire desktop when i only want to see a few plot windows, and secondly my laptop doesn't have the same high screen resolution as my work computer. I only want to see the plots, and 'ssh -X' gives me that.

    52. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That would be the core fork of a fork of X developers. With one of those forks happening because they got kicked out of the project for committing new features in a feature freeze.

      Shows how much they care about things actually working.

    53. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      I have a different view to yours. I consider Wayland a bit like systemD, a solution in need of a problem, whose final implementation, if the developers can be bothered to go all the way, will be lacking compared to the original.

      It's cool to scratch an itch in open source, but live and let live. X has proven itself, people should be improving it, not replacing it, if they want to be relevant to the majority. And they should certainly be very careful about forcing millions of people to change their software stacks if they are working on important foundations of the operating system.

    54. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's nothing wrong with those choices. The alternative is standardization imposed by the windowing environment, and we know how that worked out with gnome, you get consistent one size fits all Gui choices which are unusable to the majority of former users. It's what happened in windows this too. Way better to let the app decide how things should work. Any sane app developer will ensure that the keys do what you expect.

    55. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You do realize that when someone says it's not fixable they really mean that they don't understand why it works the way it does and they should probably not be trusted to scrap the system?

    56. Re:Seriously?? by 4im · · Score: 1

      What people want is ssh -X and yes it is a top priority to many.

      That, plus the ability to reconnect to the same session (à la screen),
      in case your connection goes lost for some reason, or if you want to
      move to a different terminal (think remote/home work first via your mobile
      device, then move on to your workstation as you get home after being
      called when on call duty).

      Similar as to what Sun did ages ago, with their Sun Rays,
      of course updated and more flexible.

    57. Re:Seriously?? by vadim_t · · Score: 1

      But that's not Wayland, it's X11, and only works for X11 applications. It'll stop working as soon as Linux applications transition to Wayland and the toolkits drop the X11 code.

    58. Re:Seriously?? by ssam · · Score: 2

      >toolkits drop the X11 code I think that's a pretty long way off.

    59. Re:Seriously?? by OneSmartFellow · · Score: 1

      What utter bullshit.

      I routinely use X forwarding on a 10 megabit LAN without any problems. More likely a poorly written application is to blame.

    60. Re:Seriously?? by OneSmartFellow · · Score: 1

      A really stripped down server only runs 1 tty, and forces the use of ed. Anything else is just fluff !

    61. Re:Seriously?? by Spacelord · · Score: 1

      So if I want to install Oracle on a server, I'm supposed to fly over to a different country where the datacenter is located and sit at the console to do it?

    62. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Could you let me know the switches you use to make the latency go away. I've tried using ssh -XC still anything more than Xeyes is unusable. "0 years ago I put it down to crap network. And since then regardless of improvement in the machine on the broadband I use it's still been unusable.
      I've wanted to argue in favour of X and use network transparency as the killer feature but so far it's been a dead loss for me.

    63. Re:Seriously?? by silentcoder · · Score: 1

      He just realized to his shock that not *all* servers are webservers or DB servers and there are more stacks than LAMP.

      --
      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
    64. Re:Seriously?? by silentcoder · · Score: 1

      Who needs ed when you have cat ?

      --
      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
    65. Re: Seriously?? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 0

      Not only did they do it wrong, half of the complaints about X are out and out FUD. See my post here:

      http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    66. Re:Seriously?? by Phreakiture · · Score: 1

      I have always suspected that the slowness of X11 over a network was primarily latency, not bandwidth. I think it waits for acknowledgement after each step before moving in, rather than (ironically) windowing the traffic. Paradoxically, adding compression to the mix may actually make things worse, because the compression and decompression steps, even if they keep up with the bandwidth demands, will add to the length of time it takes to get a request fully received, acted on, and acknowledged.

      It's just a suspicion, though. I could be completely wrong.

      --
      www.wavefront-av.com
    67. Re:Seriously?? by Sax+Russell+5449D29A · · Score: 1

      KVM switch is cheaper than flying. Any respectable datacenter has them.

      --
      -SR
    68. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Most applications do not use X11 drawing primitives. So it's all bitmaps on the wire anyway. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, other than that X11 is obsolete.

    69. Re:Seriously?? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2

      Citrix, VMWare View, etc.

    70. Re: Seriously?? by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      There are a dozen use cases for not full headless and not full desktop. I'll name you one: a laboratory workstation that you both physically sit at and occasionally check up on from your desk or your home by sshing in and running a graphical thingie to monitor to test equipment it's plugged into.

      Which works fine if your equipment supports multiple sharing sessions. If not, starting the new monitor may disrupt the existing process, screwing you over. Which is why X and remote desktop are NOT mutually exclusive - sometimes a view-only session is all you need to quickly view a setting without running something that could disrupt your long-running process.

      The other reason is if you're on a flaky connection. Do this and X becomes a poor solution because the moment your connection burps, your applications are force-quit and you lose your work.

      There are situations where one solution is better than the other. X forwarding is great, but it's not the be-all-end-all solution, especially if something you're doing is single-session only or you're not on a reliable connection (e.g., mobile) where you don't want all your programs to abort because you lost your cell signal.

    71. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is, in fact, a large part of it.

    72. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Except when Wayland was announced they declared that network transparency would be trivial and it's entirely a non-issue. Which is exactly why all of the knowledgeable users users face palmed and declared them imbeciles. If, as the Wayland developers have proclaimed, network transparency is in fact so trivial and can be done better than X, why isn't it included in the charter since the majority actually require this feature? Their answer? It's not important because the majority who require this feature don't actually require this feature and the majority are actually minorities because they've decided to ignore the majority's needs. Arrogant imbeciles.

    73. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You should take a look at Xpra. It is essentially screen for X, plus it works well over slow networks.

    74. Re:Seriously?? by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 1

      What people want is ssh -X and yes it is a top priority to many.

      That, plus the ability to reconnect to the same session (Ã la screen), ...

      In other words, what people really want is the functionality provided by xpra. The thing is, xpra would actually be easier to implement as a Wayland compositor than the current hack based on Xdummy or Xvfb.

      --
      "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
    75. Re:Seriously?? by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I routinely use X forwarding on a 10 megabit LAN without any problems. More likely a poorly written application is to blame.

      The problem is that an X application which is written correctly for local display (for example, taking advantage of hardware acceleration) is "poorly written" for running with a non-local X server, and vice-versa. To handle both cases well you have to implement two different UIs, which shows that X's much-vaunted "network transparency" isn't actually transparent at all.

      --
      "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
    76. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Please go away. It's obvious that you have no clue. You are reading responses, googling for help, and then answering questions. Gtfoh.

    77. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Interestingly contrived example. Let's spin it a little more. You are satisfied with the look of your images and you now need to send them to somebody attached to an email. What do you do? Do you screen capture them? Or do you save them to a file on the remote server and copy them to your local machine? Do you have multiple email accounts available on all the distant machines you connect to? What do you do with your credentials then?

      Viewing a graphic locally is just one part of the hole workflow. I routinely find that it's a very useless part of the whole picture and having X doesn't really bring me anything more in the end. But yeah, let's still cling to this feature.

    78. Re: Seriously?? by Sax+Russell+5449D29A · · Score: 1

      I think you accidentally ticked that "Post Anonymously" box.

      --
      -SR
    79. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A "really stripped down server" in a modern datacenter usually wouldn't even have a way to remotely log into it, let alone have Xlib/Gtk+/whatever-else installed on it to let you run GUI applications.

      I'm blown away by this suggestion that some people use X forwarding over SSH to manage remote servers. If you're doing anything interactively/manually on a remote server then that's already rather questionable in the presence of modern automation tools. In very rare cases I might log into a machine to run some debug probes to figure out why something is failing, but I'd never expect X clients to be installed on a headless server. Usually if I'm logging in at all then it's a very exceptional case and I'm doing it either via a serial console, either real (via a console server appliance) or virtual (via a VM hypervisor).

    80. Re:Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is a huge part of the discourse. For whatever reason the myth that only a minority of a minority use this feature has taken root. It's a complete fiction. The reality is, the vast majority require this feature and it's become even more important as cloud computing and virtualization has taken hold. Hell, Microsoft used to claim the same idiocy and then they came out with RDP. Even Microsoft agrees these guys are completely wrong. The vast, vast majority of Linux users are business users. That's reality. These users use network transparency. That's reality. This feature is important to the vast majority of users. Until Wayland developers and supporters are prepared to deal with the real world, they are not prepared to offer a real world solution. That's reality.

      The fact is, anyone who claims network transparency is used only by a minority or that it's unimportant is simply not prepared to participate in the real world. Period.

      You are completely correct on forgotten lessons. There is some kind of mental retardation which has taken root in the newer generation (Entitled Generation). My generation looked at what was created and said, "This is good stuff, let's evolve it and make it better." The Entitled Generation came along and said this awesome stuff can be made better by throwing it all out and attempt to redo it poorly without even bothering to understand the problem domain. They then went off and screwed everything up, usually destroying features, making things less useful, and poorly copying crappy things from Microsoft, which were universally declared shitty, and then declaring them awesome simply because they are new to the platform. Literally there is some type of retardation which has taken hold of the Entitled Generation. Projects Gnome 3, Systemd, and Wayland are classic examples of projects supported by the majority and detested by the knowledgeable minority. But apparently, universally, "new", means, "better", and throwing out empirical facts becomes priority one.

    81. Re: Seriously?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > people should be improving it, not replacing it, if they want to be relevant to the majority. And they should certainly be very careful about forcing millions of people to change their software stacks if they are working on important foundations of the operating system.

      I sure wish someone would tell Lennart that...

    82. Re:Seriously?? by squiggleslash · · Score: 1

      I use it to access LibreOffice instances running on remote AWS servers. It's perfectly fine.

      It would be nice if X11's critics actually used X11 once in a while, rather than whined incessantly about how bad it is because in theory it's bad.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    83. Re:Seriously?? by tmh+-+The+Mad+Hacker · · Score: 1

      Aside from all the jokes about not using vi, etc. I seriously marvel at the idea of a "really stripped-down server" including an X system. Though I fairly regularly use ssh -X on other workstations, I haven't included X at all on a single server (LTSP servers aside) in the last 15 years. I'm curious what kinds of tools server admins are requiring an X environment on the server for.

    84. Re:Seriously?? by whoever57 · · Score: 1

      Aside from all the jokes about not using vi, etc. I seriously marvel at the idea of a "really stripped-down server" including an X system.

      Actually, after writing that, I realized that, yes, really a stripped-down server does not include X. I have some servers configured this way.

      The point that I was trying to make is that a server should not need a desktop window manager. Earlier, in the arguments over Wayland, the response was "just use VNC". But for VNC, you need a window manager.

      I have found that managing KVM guests without virt-manager (and hence X) is a pain (although not impossible), so on my fairly stripped-down servers that act as KVM hosts, I include virt-manager and X. I run virt-manager as a network-transparent application, with the X-server on my desktop. On the servers that don't host VM guests, I can eliminate X.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    85. Re:Seriously?? by tmh+-+The+Mad+Hacker · · Score: 1

      That's a good point -- while rare for me personally, I have on occasion included minimal X libraries for particular apps before while not hosting a full-time console environment. I've run into some apps that offer GUI admin from a remote machine -- but only if you install a "big boy" web server w/ extra modules that starts to make the X installation look small and simple.

    86. Re: Seriously?? by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Wayland can do everything X does but X cannot do everything that Wayland can. Network transparency is a low priority feature compared to getting core features and cross-platform implementations working and stable. If you want it, add it yourself. Isn't that the opensource motto?

  2. How long is that then? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > For the longest time,

    Lets analyse how long this time is. The initial wayland release was on 09 February 2012 according to wikipedia, so it looks like the longest time may almost exactly 4 years, and we can now use "the longest time", or, LongestTimes as a unit of time.

    I can reveal for example, that I was born around 9 LongestTimes ago. In other words, its been the longest time, since the longest time, since the longest time, since the longest time, since the longest time, since the longest time, since the longest time, since the longest time, since the longest time, since I was born.

    1. Re:How long is that then? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a common English expression. God, read a book!

    2. Re:How long is that then? by Tailhook · · Score: 1

      Lets analyse how long this time is. The initial wayland release was on 09 February 2012...

      The 'what about network transparency?!' concern was appearing long before the initial release. Here is the usual huge thread about it from 2008: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1017147&cid=25619591

      About 7 months ago I began using Linux on a headless workstation via VNC as my primary interface for development work. On my gigabit LAN the performance is amazing; certainly at least as good as remote X, but without all the font and window manager glitches inherent to remote X, and I don't need an X server on my desktop. The server software is TightVNC and the viewer is TigerVNC. It's actually far better than RDP from a new Windows 10 laptop on the same network. All Wayland would have to do is match that and I'm good with it. At least on fast local network.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
    3. Re:How long is that then? by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1

      It sounds like a line out of a Billy Joel song.

    4. Re:How long is that then? by godrik · · Score: 1

      So if you are on the same network as the machine you are connecting to, VNC is a reasonable option. With higher latency and lower bandwidth, it can get really painful.
      The advantage of X is that you could only have a single application running over the network which tends to be much less consuming in network resource. Also that application would just integrate in your desktop environment perfectly.

      Haven't tried wayland yet.

  3. It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland yet! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Holy fuck, how about they actually make it simple to run Wayland?!

    I mean they've been working on Wayland for years now, yet it's still a real pain in the ass to get working on a modern Linux distro.

    As shitty as X.org is, at least it's fairly easy to install and get working these days. It usually just happens as part of the Linux distro installation.

    But getting Wayland running? Holy fucking moley! Be prepared for a fight!

    The best I've managed so far was getting some Wayland-in-X thing running, and the results were less than spectacular.

    I don't give a fuck about its support for network transparency when I can't even get the fucker to run on my systems!

    They should at least get it to the point where it can be used on a standalone workstation, and only then should they look into network transparency.

    A windowing system that we can't actually use is, well, pretty fucking useless!

  4. ssh -Y > ssh -X by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I use it all the time for gitk and gitgui, which are great tools.
    If gitk/gitgui had their own remote-repo-via-ssh functionality then remote display functionality wouldn't be necessary.

  5. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Previously, the developers always refused to consider network transparency, and heated discussions followed. If now it is accepted, it is newsworthy for those who care about the feature, even though nobody can actually run Wayland yet.

  6. Those who do not understand X by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Those who do not understand X are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

    -- Harry Spencer (sort of).

    1. Re:Those who do not understand X by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would guess the Wayland developers understand X better than you do.

    2. Re: Those who do not understand X by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 2

      Yes. But they don't understand the needs of people who use X, and they don't understand that they don't understand. That's why talking to them about network transparency has been only marginally more productive than discussing the finer points of French Impressionism with an upturned tree stump.

    3. Re:Those who do not understand X by obsess5 · · Score: 1

      Isn't that Henry?

    4. Re: Those who do not understand X by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Yes. But they don't understand the needs of people who use X, and they don't understand that they don't understand.

      Actually, I think they understand fine, but just don't care.

  7. Wake me up.... by markdavis · · Score: 2

    Wake me up in several or more years when something is actually available, works, and is really backwards compatible. Meanwhile, those of us who depend on thin clients really do have a problem with throwing away X11.

  8. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Arguably, their stupidity and support to fight against network transparency, while hand waving that it's not an issue, is likely a huge part of the reason Wayland has languished. Had they and their supporters not been so idiotic, Wayland would likely be the defacto Linux GUI today.

    Most everyone wants a modern GUI framework but not at the cost of loss of significant, not trivial features. Doing otherwise is idiotic.

  9. ssh -x rocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Our accounting package runs on a vm on a server. Several people run the app on the server with the graphics rendered locally. Vnc sessions would be horrid for this ise case. Oh and the accounting package is ancient but works great.

  10. WTF is Wayland by Snotnose · · Score: 0

    and why should I care? Jeez people, is it really that hard to add a line to the summary to explain these esoteric things?

    1. Re:WTF is Wayland by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Wayland is a fairly controversial replacement for X11, written by the people currently maintaining the X.org X11 stack.

      As the summary implies, Wayland been criticized for lacking significant features of X11 such as network transparency. Defenders have argued that network transparency is a minority application and that they don't like the way it's implemented in X11 anyway,

      Those of us who use network transparency are rather bothered by being told that something that works fine for us (and it does, I regularly have to configure LibreOffice systems running on AWS instances, and have never bumped into any of the supposed problems Wayland advocates insist I have) are things we don't really need or want. We're not happy about losing functionality simply so that someone can go from 59fps to 59.5fps when playing Call of Duty.

      Previous proposals have varied from proposals for an optional intermediary protocol sitting between Wayland and the client (apparently by people who have no idea what the transparency part of "Network transparency") and even the ability to stream the contents of Windows using H.264.

      This proposal sounds, at least at first glance, to be better than those hacks. Hopefully it means they're finally taking the issue seriously.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    2. Re:WTF is Wayland by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

      Actually the summary doesn't mention X11 at all. Even that would have helped. It just says that Wayland has been criticized for lacking network transparency and a set of patches were released for pushing the protocol over TCP/IP. I had no idea what Wayland was from the summary because I've been away from the Linux movement for a while (I used to be system administrator). Even just just including the word X11 in the summary would have made it much clearer.

    3. Re:WTF is Wayland by steveha · · Score: 1

      Defenders have argued that network transparency is a minority application and that they don't like the way it's implemented in X11 anyway,

      All I need to know is that all the people who know the most about X11 think Wayland is a good idea.

      Here's a talk from 2013 where an experienced X11 developer explaining exactly what is wrong with X11 and why he thinks Wayland is a good idea. This link starts 40 minutes into the talk, where he specifically talks about running remotely over a network.

      https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44?t=40m22s

      And I've never seen a Wayland developer say that network transparency would never happen; they were focused on getting the essentials right.

      Here's a talk from SCALE a year ago. This link starts with him saying exactly that: the Wayland guys were focused on essentials but now are ready to start looking at remote.

      https://youtu.be/Sz1T0GvUziw?t=27m36s

      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
    4. Re:WTF is Wayland by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thank you. When it comes to Wayland discussions I completely tune out people who claim network transparency is not an issue. It immediately indicates they have nothing to contribute to the discussion as they have no knowledge of the topic. Network transparency is a huge issue for power users and system administrators which make up the majority of Linux users. The fact is, the majority of Linux installations are business. Network administrators uses these features. Turns out a minority are speaking for a minority while attempting to marginalize the majority and don't understand why the knowledgeable majority are face palming at their arrogant stupidity.

      I don't know a single, knowledgeable user who fights to support X. They, like me, do fight against Wayland. The simple fact is, X needs to be replaced or a new version developed (X12) to modernize features and current GPU capabilities. That said, so long as users continue to push half solutions which satisfies only a verbose, arrogant, idiotic minority, Wayland is going to struggle to gain traction and acceptance unless the gaming community becomes the majority. Especially since the power users are far more likely to be the developers which require proper network support.

      I'd love for Wayland to fix things for Linux. But until they extract their head from their asses, Wayland is a half broken solution. The fact they are now seriously entertaining a solution for the majority, means they may well have extracted their heads from their asses. This is good for everyone.

       

    5. Re:WTF is Wayland by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When X developers say that X is a pile of kludges and is a pain to maintain, I tend to believe them. When the guy who wrote the multitouch support says it is "a nightmare" and "shit", I believe him. (He's been working on X for over a decade...)

      X is a bodge but it does work (I'm using X as I type this). But I think you are going too far when you accuse the Wayland developers of lying.

      I have read your rebuttals and you haven't convinced me. The Wayland guys are saying that the way X is used these days is far removed from its origins, and it would be cleaner and better to start over. They aren't saying that Wayland won't ever need extensions, they are saying that they have learnt lessons from X and applied those lessons to the design of Wayland, making it a better protocol for modern uses from the get-go. It shouldn't need as many extensions.

      And I don't know why you even really care. If your favourite Linux ever adopts Wayland, all your apps will still work... through a Wayland X server if need be.

    6. Re:WTF is Wayland by serviscope_minor · · Score: 0

      When X developers say that X is a pile of kludges and is a pain to maintain,

      X is a protocol. Many of their complaints are about their implementation of the protocol that they wrote, not the underlying system. They're essentially blaming X for their own flaws in a number of cases.

      If they wrote X as a big pile of kludges, they'll do exactly the same with Wayland.

      The Wayland guys are saying that the way X is used these days is far removed from its origins, and it would be cleaner and better to start over.

      They say many things. Some are true, some are not. It's just bizarre that they completely take X to task for having API updates over the years, for example. Every system over version 0.1 has API updates, Wayland included.

      It shouldn't need as many extensions.

      Extension is X11 speak for new API functions. Wayland will get new functions in it's API just like X as time goes on.

      And I don't know why you even really care.

      A major piece of Linux infrastructure being replaced by a bunch of people who are being dishonest about what they're replacing is just a bad smell to me.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    7. Re:WTF is Wayland by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > If they wrote X as a big pile of kludges, they'll do exactly the same with Wayland.

      Right, because they haven't learned anything whatsoever in 30+ years of developing and maintaining a massive codebase of extremely widely used software.

    8. Re:WTF is Wayland by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      Right, because they haven't learned anything whatsoever in 30+ years of developing and maintaining a massive codebase of extremely widely used software.

      Apparently not: they're blaming X (the protocol) not Xorg, their implementation of it. Bear in mind under their stewardship it's been largely rewritten. Some of the mistakes are theirs and they're blaming others.

      That does not sound like a bunch of people who have learned lessons and will do it better next time.

      Compare that to the slow and carful translation of GCC to C++ along with refactoring.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  11. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Install Fedora 23. During login, click the little gear and pick Gnome on Wayland. Easy and everything seems to work. Software that isn't rendering over Wayland uses the X server which in turn renders to Wayland.

  12. Ignore the Wayland hate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wayland already runs X, warts and all. No improvements, mere backwards compatibility. Even ssh -X works.
    Some people like to complain about Wayland not having network transparency (meaning the new compositor doesn't have it, yet).

    The article is about adding network transparency to the "new and improved" compositor and then comparing performance between old and new.

    Some people will complain, "why do we need to switch?" The answer is most of the human beings that understand X Windows are dead and a few of those that remain are working on Wayland to eventually replace X.

    1. Re: Ignore the Wayland hate by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 0

      Spoken like someone fundamentally afraid of code. X is a big lump of code, but it's written without too much spaghetti and you can follow the call tree to understand how stuff gets for on call to server to device to screen. And if you take the time: a few days to get an impression, a few weeks to gain notional comprehension, and a few months to achieve fluency, you'll "understand". And if you were serious about tweaking your own implementation, you could do it. Unless you're a lazy ass.

    2. Re: Ignore the Wayland hate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Someone else posted a response to that: see below:

      Once X toolkits lose support, so does this feature. You're saying it's not a problem specifically because the thing you believe is better is failing to do what you claim Wayland does better. The fact is, Wayland IS the problem you just declared Wayland fixes.

  13. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is ludicrous. Wayland is hardly "languishing", and there has been no push on anyone's part to make it the "de factor Linux GUI". It is under development, everyone recognizes it as the next way forward, toolkits and drivers are targeting and supporting it, and it will be adopted when it is ready for adoption.

    Anyone using the interim period to scream about network transparency is a moron. Yes, that means you.

  14. One Acronym by TheDarkener · · Score: 1

    LTSP

    --
    It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
  15. vnc is to X as penthouse is to girlfriend by raymorris · · Score: 5, Informative

    X is a protocol for graphical interface elements, such as application windows. With remote X, the application's window IS on your local screen, using the remote cpu and fileystem. It's part of your local desktop, a real, local window.

    VNC is a highly compressed PICTURE of a remote desktop.

    Since X is the real thing, and VNC is a low quality PICTURE of what X is actually doing, it's just like you're saying that a porno mag is better than an actual girlfriend. Your comment is THAT ridiculous.

    Besides the fact that you seemingly don't know the difference between an application and a desktop environment.

    If you ever want to stop masturbating with VNC and try the real thing, use vnc -Y -C . Y is a better version of -X, and -C enables lossless compression, which is very useful on most networks.

    1. Re:vnc is to X as penthouse is to girlfriend by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      it's just like you're saying that a porno mag is better than an actual girlfriend.

      Well, we ARE on slashdot.

      VNC actually exists, where as remote Wayland is something people have only heard of in theory.

      Just like porn mags vs. actual an girlfriend.

    2. Re:vnc is to X as penthouse is to girlfriend by dargaud · · Score: 1

      If you ever want to stop masturbating with VNC and try the real thing, use vnc -Y -C

      I guess you mean "ssh -YC" ?

      --
      Non-Linux Penguins ?
    3. Re:vnc is to X as penthouse is to girlfriend by Bengie · · Score: 1

      In theory, X is the real thing, in practice it is not. Many of the core Wayland devs were/are also the core X devs and have been for decades(many have been working on X almost since the beginning). X has become a ball of hacks over the years and is no longer what people claim it to be. There are many things that X cannot do without breaking other things, and these new things must be supported in order to stay relevant. Wayland is an attempt to modernize with the X team leading the charge in an attempt to make a good compromise. If they didn't, someone else would try to fill the massive gap and would probably do a horrible job because they don't have the 15-20 years of experience that many of these X devs have.

    4. Re:vnc is to X as penthouse is to girlfriend by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your analogy is ridiculous and detrimental to your argument.

  16. Re: It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh, that's efficient. So soon I can look forward to rendering my X apps to network-transparent Wayland--though X has this capability baked in? My heart leaps with joy!

  17. Niche case by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Niche case is an euphemism for "what I don't care for".

    Given this definition, you, Sir are a niche case.

  18. Re:2nd post for Trump!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Trump is a so much of a retard he can't count to potato

  19. Re:2nd post for Trump!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    *fart* *fart* Oh god, I dropped an Obama in my pants!

    This wouldn't have happened if you hadn't had goatse ream your arse out

  20. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's definately not true. Only select few need the network transparency. I've never used it on X, i don't give a crap about it. And wayland devs did not fight against it. They said they are not going to do it, anyone else is free to do it. I think they have more important things to work on, before baking in some rarely used feature.

  21. Re:ssh -Y ssh -X by ssam · · Score: 1

    "ssh -X" already works fine on wayland. Install Fedora 23, start a wayland session and try it. (Ok, it starts up an xwayland server underneath, but from a user point of view it works indistinguishably)

  22. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

    It's not surprising. The people writing Wayland are the current stewards of X, and have been responsible for a number of really user-hostile things in X development too.

    For example there used to be a keystroke for killing grabs. They removed it claiming it was "unnecessary" because you only need it if there's a bug in an application. So you should fix the buggy application, rather than just killing the grab (or application) and continuing with your day.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  23. systemd To The Rescue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Good news! systemd should be handling all graphics processing in just a few more days. You won;t need to worry about Wayland or X11 or or anything else. Just sit back and let systemd take care of it for you.

    While we're waiting, perhaps you could rewrite logger so that we can have applications and script write to the system log like we use to be able to before systemd decided that we didn't need to write to or view logs anymore.

    It's going to be a fucking riot when Ubuntu 15.04LTS drops and everyone sees that systemd broke all their shit. LOL!

  24. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by thegarbz · · Score: 1

    Had they and their supporters not been so idiotic, Wayland would likely be the defacto Linux GUI today.

    Errr no. Were Wayland actually ready for the prime time and not still a nightmare to get going it would likely be the default today. To be very clear many of us don't give a shit about network transparency but still can't get Wayland going for one reason or another.

  25. yeah, typo. ssh not vnc by raymorris · · Score: 1

    Yeah, that should be ssh -YC or ssh -Y -C, not vnc.

    (By habit I normally seperate my flags since -AB can mean -A B, with B being an argument to A).

  26. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by dingman · · Score: 1

    Is Fedora 23 a "modern Linux distro"? If so, to use Wayland on a modern distro, click on the little gear under your name on the login screen and choose "Gnome on Wayland". It's so easy I've done it by accident. (Synergy still has no Wayland support, so I don't want it as my default, but GDM remembers what desktop you chose last time.) This is a "real pain in the ass"?

    My current complaints are that Synergy doesn't work, which isn't really a Wayland failing at all; lack of an xrandr equivalent that I've found in a couple days of casual looking; and that I can't middle-click to paste anymore in native Wayland applications. (That last actually does still work between applications running on XWayland.) The availablility of XWayland also should mean that you can still use ssh -X from a desktop running Wayland and forward remote X applications. Still, I'm happy to see networks transparency developed for Wayland, because eventually X won't cover everything graphical I want to run from a remote VM.

    Wayland already handles multiple monitors with different DPI much better than X, which is why I went ahead and tried it for a while recently. Other than the items mentioned above, the experience was barely noticeable. If I can find a replacement for xrandr to use in my screen rotation script, I'll probably switch my convertible laptop from X to Wayland by default, since I don't use it with Synergy and I do plug it in to a variety of external displays. My work laptop and desktop systems will probably stay on X until there is Wayland support in Synergy, or a Synergy replacement for Wayland. For my use, I don't even care if such a replacement supports any non-Wayland displays, since I could switch everything at once and non-Linux OSes are confined to VMs in my life.

  27. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You completely missed the point. Had the Wayland developers not been idiotic in alienating the power users, which at the time was the majority of Linux users, Wayland would have likely obtained critical mass, which would have addressed both issues. Your complaint exists because Wayland is not popular. Wayland is not popular because they made idiotic choices which destroy features and alienated key demographics. It just so happens that the power users they alienated are also the same developers who would have been likely to support, grow, and develop the project.

    The biggest problem Wayland has is a large, ignorant, myopic view of the platform. They are their own worst enemy - and proud of it. That's idiotic.

  28. Re:ssh -Y ssh -X by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "It works indistinguishably", until toolkits are updated to use Wayland. Once X toolkits lose support, so does this feature. You're saying it's not a problem specifically because the thing you believe is better is failing to do what you claim Wayland does better. The fact is, Wayland IS the problem you just declared Wayland fixes.

  29. Re:yeah, typo. ssh not vnc by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 1

    (By habit I normally seperate my flags since -AB can mean -A B, with B being an argument to A).

    With separate flags that becomes "-A -B", with -B being an argument to -A. How is that better?

    --
    "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
  30. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 1

    For example there used to be a keystroke for killing grabs. They removed it claiming it was "unnecessary" because you only need it if there's a bug in an application.

    They removed it because it was a security problem, not because it was "unnecessary". You could use it to bypass lock screens, which are implemented in part through screen grabs.

    The AllowDeactivateGrabs and AllowClosedownGrabs options are available in xorg.conf if you want to restore the original insecure behavior.

    --
    "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
  31. Re: It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We have found one of the 10 wayland users. Everyone point at him and laugh. Sad that his new and improved system still can't even compete with the old system.

  32. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > This is ludicrous. Wayland is hardly "languishing

    You should look up the word, "languish."

    You should learn more about a subject before you form an opinion. Forming an opinion based on your ignorance creates posts like yours. That's the problem. Read the anonymous comments here. You'll consistently find that those of us who actually know what we're talking about all agree with me. Those who know absolutely nothing of the subject matter take your position. And nothing in your comment even begins to address anything which is topical. Not only did you fail to properly apply the definition of a key word, you then go on to add nothing to the discourse. Thusly further proving my point that those of us who actually know something of the topic are face palming the idiocy of comments like yours.

  33. not on Linux (glibc getopt) by raymorris · · Score: 1

    Most Linux programs use the getopt() function from the C library.
    getopt() in glibc treats -A -B as two switches. -B can never be interpreted as an argument to -A. On the other hand, -AB DOES set B as the argument to -A, if -A can take an argument. -AB is two arguments IF -A can't take an argument. So on Linux, -AB can have two different meanings. -A -B has only one meaning, it's always two switches.
    http://linux.die.net/man/3/get...

    1. Re:not on Linux (glibc getopt) by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 1

      I believe you'll find that the standard behavior under Linux is the opposite of what you claim:

      [~]$ ssh -o -Y test@example.com
      command-line: line 0: Bad configuration option: -y

      The `getopts` command in Bash works the same way:

      [~]$ set -- -A -B
      [~]$ getopts "A:B" opt; echo $opt; echo $OPTARG;
      A
      -B

      As does `ls`:

      [tmp]$ touch -- -t plain
      [tmp]$ ls
      -t plain
      [tmp]$ ls -t
      -t plain
      [tmp]$ ls -I-t
      plain
      [tmp]$ ls -I -t
      plain

      (Tested in Debian Linux. The -I (--ignore) option to `ls` specifies a glob pattern to skip in the output.)

      Even the test program in the getopt(3) manual page you linked to processes "-t -n" as a single option "-t" with argument "-n". The documentation simply states that "optstring is a string containing the legitimate option characters. If such a character is followed by a colon, the option requires an argument, so getopt() places a pointer to the following text in the same argv-element, or the text of the following argv-element, in optarg." There is nothing to indicate that following argv-elements starting with a dash are treated differently.

      Options with optional arguments (like Perl's "-i" option) are not allowed to be split, so in this case "-A -B" would indeed be treated as two separate options. However, this would cause "-A B" to be processed as an argumentless "-A" and a separate positional argument "B" (equivalent to "B -A"), and not as a substitute for "-AB".

      --
      "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
  34. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wayland is not now, and has not been trying to be a major part of Linux desktop environments. "Power users"?! way to generalize from your own example. The number of desktop installs is minuscule compared to the number of servers and appliances. There has been no push by anyone to try to make it any sort of default. Go to their website and find me anything that says that it is anything other than a work in progress.

    "It is intended to be..."
    "It could replace X as the native Linux graphics server, but..."
    "Further down the road..."
    "I'm not deluding myself that any general purpose desktop Linux distribution will stop shipping X as we know it or as a Wayland client anytime soon. Nor should they..."
    Toolkit support is almost all listed as "experimental".

    Wayland is not the default Linux graphics server because it's not fucking done yet, not because of some whinging neckbeards.

  35. example: perl -i by raymorris · · Score: 1

    An example might be helpful. These two commands mean completely different things:

    perl -i -w
    perl -iw

    The first means both -i (inplace edit, do not create backup files) and -w (show warnings)

    The second means inplace edit, with backup files named "w". (Do NOT show warnings. )

    If you mean to pass two flags, -x -y will always do that. -xy sometimes will, but sometimes it has a completely different meaning.

  36. that's what I just said, it depends on if arg opti by raymorris · · Score: 1

    Avoiding inconsistent behavior due to optional arguments is the whole point. Reread what I just said:

    -AB DOES set B as the argument to -A, if -A can take an argument. -AB is two arguments IF -A can't take an argument. So on Linux, -AB can have two different meanings.

    It's easy to forget that -A CAN optionally take an argument, if you're accustomed to using it without. You wouldn't forget that -o always has a required argument, if you use it at all. That is, you'd never use "ls -I ht" expecting it to behave the same as "ls ht -I", because obviously -I needs argument.

  37. Re:that's what I just said, it depends on if arg o by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 1

    You're moving the goalposts. What you said was:

    So on Linux, -AB can have two different meanings. -A -B has only one meaning, it's always two switches.

    "-A -B" is two switches only if "-A" does not have a required argument, otherwise it's one switch. It is not true that "-A -B" is always two switches.

    If you're not sure whether a switch takes an optional argument, then the "-AB" and "-A -B" forms have the minor advantage of being unambiguous given that the switch either can take an argument or can be used without one, respectively. However, a better solution would be to consult the --help text or manual page and remove the uncertainty.

    --
    "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
  38. Unless of course you have work to do ;) by raymorris · · Score: 1

    > However, a better solution would be to consult the --help text or manual page and remove the uncertainty.

    While carefully reading the man page again for each command you type and carefully comparing what you're typing for each option to it's manual page specification -would- be effective, I'm not sure how many people want to spend the time doing that. Tapping the space bar by habit is a MUCH quicker way to avoid the common error case.

    Much like consistently putting switches before arguments:
    command file1 file 2 -a -b -- Sometimes works as expected, common source of error.
    command -a -b file1 file 2 -- Consistently works as expected, rarely / never causes error.

    It doesn't take any longer to type the options before the arguments, and it works with POSIX-correct software.

  39. Re:It's 2016 and I can't even easily run Wayland y by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You, are, an, idiot. Period.

    Wayland, from the get go, is intended to replace X. Period.

    Nothing you've "contributed" changes anything which has been said here.