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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.
What people want is ssh -X and yes it is a top priority to many.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
>toolkits drop the X11 code I think that's a pretty long way off.
Citrix, VMWare View, etc.
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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.
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