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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.