There are laws we are a signatory to passed by the congress tying us heavily to international human rights. This isn't side-stepping congress it is implementing the black letter laws passed by congress for the United states. This is precisely how our system is supposed to work congress passes laws and the executive implements regulations in tune with those laws.
Waco was an example of a group that had shot 4 federal agents trying to administer a court order and then refused to surrender. You don't have the right to violently resist police enforcement. You comply and after the fact sue if there were civil rights violations.
I had friends at Tahrir square. After they were arrested they were sent to jail for extended periods of time. At occupy they were mainly out within 24 hours with minor fines. In Syria the police are clearing the square with thousands of deaths. In the USA were are upset someone got hit and hospitalized and a few people got hit with tear gas.
We have problems but they are orders of magnitude different. And as an aside, London did assist the Confederate States of America and no we don't like it.
James Risen published highly classified materials. He is not under criminal threat for anything other than failure to obey a court order to reveal sources. One can argue how strongly or not strongly the government should protect journalists who assist espionage, balancing national security against the public's write to know. That is far far different than not having a free society.
Similarly with wikileaks spokespeople. The USA does absolutely nothing to people who are outside the mainstream. You can read communist newspapers to kinist newspapers and they can publish freely. What you are talking about is going beyond dissent as a matter of opinion and instead and taking action to undermine the effectiveness of the government in carrying out actions. Yes that's going to get looked at more harshly.
Well actually a 1/2 million. And they were a secondary cause of 9/11, the primary cause was our support for the Saudi government against their internal rebels.
And this is about computer technology sanctions against Western / US companies not food sanctions against opposed countries.
I don't think so this isn't Microsoft with a complex eco system of interlocking vendors this is Apple with a top down style. If Mac users are being confronted with security threats Apple is going to design a response and focus on developers to rapidly bring their applications up to date. The message is going to be "we are taking care of it, make sure your applications are focused on meeting security standard XYZ because in 47 days..."
The infrastructure is in place for apple to turn the security way up very quickly. What doesn't exist yet is a business need.
Except they aren't as vulnerable there is a pretty long history at this point of OSX. Further the ability to move the developer community rapidly, and having a user base that is comfortable with application breakage on OS updates, means that Apple can enhance security. They have also laid a lot of groundwork in terms of security infrastructure for example the defaulting regarding application install and the sandboxing.
A few slips once in a while is substantially different than the same level of problems as windows.
Facebook wasn't buying revenue. Instagram represented 30m users engaged in social networking which would be a terrific way to get Google+ off the ground. Facebook bought to maintain their monopoly. They are going to make some money but honestly it wouldn't have changed the deal much if they had to buy Instagram and burn the business to the ground the next day.
There are technologies for managing IP addresses which are used by large business / complex networks in the IPv4 world that are likely to move downmarket in the IPv6 world. A world where a consumer has 1000 devices trying to interact with one another with complex addressing is not far off. So far the consumer vendors have done a rather excellent job of moving complex networking technologies down to the consumer realm via. good defaults and I think this won't be an exception.
As for a firewall in between. These devices need to tunnel to one another.
Do you know, how many times a similar project was in exactly the same position, and ended up scrapped?
None, I don't remember any similar projects to replace X with this level of support in the last 2 decades. The closest I can think of is the move to change leadership i.e. from xfree86 to x.org.
they are directed to people who consider "porting" good projects (gtk, qt, kde, compiz) to the clusterfuck in the making, thus giving it mindshare.
Those people aren't considering they doing this, rather they at the 1/2 way mark more or less in terms of implementation of allowing Wayland versions that are equally functional, a porting library. That part is going to be done soon. The big step for them is offering Wayland versions that have features not present in the X version. And to convince them not to do that you are going to need reasons not name calling.
Nokia (QT) focus is on cell phones. Being able to offer developers the ability to bring their cell phone applications directly to Windows (GDI) with similar high performance routines. Your feeling is that network transparency is more valuable though you can't articulate a why.
GTK is run out of Gnome whose focus is moving down market on hardware. So similar to QT.
Compiz you don't stand a chance. Wayland is a pure plus for them, besides they are owned by Canonical that is committed to Wayland.
So if you are going to aim at considering it would be the application developer level who have to decide whether to port to Wayland or worse from your perspective, include feature only available in the Wayland library versions, you are going to need to provide them a reason. KDE is more interesting here. First off KDE doesn't make meaningful use of network transparency, so that's not a huge loss, and again that's something your argument to deal with. However, breaking compatibility with X11 would be a huge step for KDE. The whole "fragmenting the Unix market..." argument that is also being raised is going to have some level of inherent support. But at the same time better compatibility with the native window systems of OSX and Windows is a huge plus and that will have inherent support. I think the later fragmentation is worse for them than the former. Moreover I suspect that is KDE and Gnome move to Wayland all the other Unixes will follow them. So ultimately the only counter argument is going to be that if KDE and Gnome move away from X11 it will become a legacy technology and network transparency lost for a generation.
Which means you need to address the importance of network transparency. Because you are saying to those library and GUI providers they should make major sacrifices in their strategic goals to preserve network transparency. For that argument to carry weight you need to be able to articulate why network transparency is vital. And in particular, since it is obviously not vital now, why you would expect a reversal of the trend away from using network transparency.
It is off the ground. The alpha already handles Clutter and EFL are done. X, GTK, QT have partially working versions, buggy as heck but running apps. Ubuntu and Fedora are planning to switch. KDE is working on a direct to Wayland compile. Compiz has already isolated the X based code. The system is still swamped with bugs and thus might fail but it is well past getting off the ground.
And I urge you to consider, the people you consider ignorant or arrogant are the people who care about the display server. If you can't make a valid argument to them you aren't going to be able to make an argument to others. So do what you want. But if argument is going to matter at all, most likely is going to be network transparency is so important that distributions shouldn't move over to Wayland even though it offers advantages. If there is an argument there you probably have less than 3 years to make it.
Again you can do what you want. But the questions I raised in this thread are the ones anyone who cares enough about the issue are going to raise.
Re:If they plan on going mobile then i'm afraid
on
Qt 5 Alpha Released
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QT has binding to widget sets from many languages as does GDK. If you want to use a non standard language, particularly one where you want non standard primitives (i.e. you want thing other than integer, string... to be first class objects) QT makes it easy. Interesting enough one of the obvious areas that this sort of application makes sense is programming language GUIs. For example the dynamic language GUI problem hasn't been solved since "evaluatable statements" is a complex context specific idea while statements in static languages are not nearly so complex.
write-once, run-anywhere is the biggest load of bullshit to ever appear in computing
write-once, run anywhere obviously does work the website you are on is a good example of that. Windows, OSX, and Linux users all experience roughly the same thing. The issue is that this application is of fairly limited complexity. As application complexity increases platform specific features become desirable. However, the vast majority, possibly overwhelming majority of applications are simple.
If Wayland remains vaporware it isn't a problem. The issue is when it becomes a real system. And the counter argument to the real system is network transparency. So yeah you do have to defend why network transparency is worth the cost, given it not becoming a successful distributed application paradigm.
No one disagrees X11 has been the dominant system for 3 decades. What they are disagreeing about, and started disagreeing about even by the early 1990s was whether that was a good thing.
Linux has been the desktop leader on *nix since the 1990s. While Wayland itself is Linux only there is no reason other *nix can't move to via. a porting effort. So I would expect to see something like Wayland-Quartz just as there is XQuartz today. That is if Wayland takes off it will become the dominant desktop system for all the *nix IMHO. There obviously will be something a transition bump, but there will likely be little reason to run the X11 Server over the Wayland Client, so I assume most distributions will move quickly. That is because Wayland is backwards compatible the move on the client side is easy.
There is plenty of data here we don't have to use anecdotes on individual women. When we start talking about women in the tens of millions, yes they are the large screen demographic.
As for Windows phones and hardware diversity. Agreed. They aren't the major competitor to Apple at the moment.
. As a result, IMO Android will become a phone for the cheap and those that do very little.
You are forgetting a 3rd demographic those that want hardware diversity. For example Androids with large screen are really popular with women who carry their phone in their purse and want a mini tablet experience. Cheap was the first demographic (i.e. people wanted low end hardware).
The real interesting issue is whether hardware diversity will be a positive enough experience to compensate for the lack of quality in the total experience. I suspect not, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.
There have been lots of articles on that. It depends what you want to include. Apple spends a lot more on advertising because the manufacturers generally cobrand with the carriers. Apple spends much more on development. Apple is starting to subsidize manufacturers of parts, especially memory. Samsung uses its own manufacturing facilities and Motorola its own chips. Apple owns its own stores. Apple runs their warranty program at a loss while the Android carriers don't. Apple has crossover marketing opportunities that the other manufacturers don't so even comparing advertising costs is complex.
So it really isn't if you will excuse the pun, an apples to apples comparison. In general though, Apple's margins are higher. Gross margins of about 50% vs. 60% on high end phones. On lower end phones the margins fall for both of them. For example on the 3G Apple isn't just giving up the $200 in price but another $50+ (over 2 years) in subsidy. They aren't saving nearly $250 on cheaper parts and lower support costs. And this drives margins down to around 20-30%.
On the other hand Android OS costs are much higher than Apple's. Android allows for much greater carrier customization and much greater device diversity. On the upside Android costs are mostly born by the carriers as a way to upsell other features.
If you are interested Google, there is a lot out there on this. But easy comparisons are facile.
If ANY application that user has to use remotely is not usable over the network, then ALL of them are unusable over the network, and the user is forced to use "remote desktop" to run all of them in a pseudo-desktop window.
That's not true. You can use network transparency for some applications and a virtual desktop for others, just have more than one connection. Moreover these may not be happening at the same time.
My whole point is that we should not allow development of applications with sabotaged network transparency. The author won't notice if he used a new whiz-bang toolkit and his application is now "local only", but the user will, and I do not want to be faced with applications built with this kind of sabotaged libraries in toolkits in my work, just because someone used a nice-looking library while being unaware how it hurts users.
First off I can't imagine using many if any applications where the choice of client architecture wasn't decided rather deliberately. So I don't agree applications authors will be unaware of this choice to move towards local only, I think it will be a quite deliberate choice to take advantage of features only available on the local libraries.
I understand your point, you consider network transparency vital. But if you want to convince people, you have to explain why network transparency is so lightly used. Why is it that Citrix (remote desktop) seems to be the remote system of choice and not Unix based solutions? Why is it that most applications are designed for client / server either thick client or web? OSX has been in what is pretty close to the post Wayland world now for ten years with xquartz included in the OS. And yet I can't think of a single major application that considers X11 a value add. When Unix apps are ported they generally port in via. X11 and then almost immediately create an Aqua interface. Remote applications that can't be delivered via. Aqua or thick clients use Flash, Java, AJAX. If network transparency were genuinely highly valuable over remote desktop we would see more of it being used in practice.
You and I are on a discussion board with a high number of Linux users and essentially everyone on this board is technology knowledgeable enough to use X11 on windows. The developers have pushed towards additional functionality they haven't chosen to ever offer a thick client with network transparent access. Why not?
On LInux where everyone's native GUI has full support for network transparency the overwhelming amount of application usage is applications running with the same machine being the XServer and XClient, that is not using transparency. Even Linux shops don't make much use of it anymore. The fact is that Unixes have had network transparency since the mid 1980s. End users just don't use it very much. It hasn't turned out to be a killer feature, I thought in the 1990s that it would be when I compared networking on Unixes to technologies like Windows for Workgroups. But X isn't all that much better 18 years later and Windows / OSX networking is. The fact is that X11 is optimized for hardware X servers, and those don't exist anymore. X11 simply hasn't been able to migrate to new technologies and as a result server side rendering has had no advantages that are used in practice in any large scale way.
End users aren't meaningfully harmed by dropping network transparency.
I can think of a lot of reasons X11 failed: a) The fragmentation between the major unix vendors b) The fact that high speed client libraries like NeWS / 4sight never got fully integrated. c) The conservatism of the x86free management people, with respect to feature enhancements and a lost year or two. d) The hostility towards QT which prevent QT from being directly integrated. e) And probably most importantly the move towards a more secure internet. The days when rlogin, rcp and rsh were common and xservers ran with low security so you could throw windows where ever you wanted are over.
High latency connections are absolutely a requirement. The whole direction for the last 2 decades in terms of outsourcing the data center and now cloud computing has been to deliver servers via. a WAN. MPLS reduce jitter and latency but still not enough to get LAN like performance. IPv6 will likely reduce latency but it will still be years before IPv6 can be assumed. An application solution that doesn't work well with WAN is unacceptable.
This is one of the reasons that network transparency did not become a killer feature for Linux. Even Linux apps have had to use a Client / Server approach.
Wayland developers have no intention of support X but they can bundle it in their window manager. The same way that Apple bundles an X11/quartz-wm with Aqua. Apple only supports the compatibility part, major advances in X11 pass through to Apple because mostly they just compile off the shelf x.org X11. Wayland AFAIK will do the same thing.
As far as applications for Wayland. a) Those that need to be network transparent will use X11 standards. b) Those that need performance will use the Wayland standards. that leaves about 90% of the applications. Obviously in the early years those apps will be X11 however if Wayland is unsuccessful then they will likely become Wayland apps as the libraries move over, i.e. for no particular reason.
If you are saying that Wayland applications won't be usable with an X11 Server running directly against the OS, i.e. X11 not running inside Wayland, yes absolutely that's the intention. Wayland applications will not have X11 compatibility the same way GDI or Aqua applications can't run directly against X11. That's the intention. Wayland aims to replace X11 for desktop usage. There is no question the goal is to retire X11.
We can imagine a world, say in 2030 where Wayland has been successful. Libraries moved over to first start Wayland and later GUI libraries introduced Wayland only features that couldn't be implemented in X11. So applications start casually using features that prevent effective network transparency even those that would benefit from network transparency. In which case I'd assume those applications become client / server the way they are on Windows and OSX today. I certainly remember using network transparency a lot 1988-1995 or so, it worked wonderfully for dumb terminals. As you've mentioned X11 itself and X11 applications don't handle latency well and so using network transparency over a WAN has been less than pleasant. I like it on LANs but still don't use it all that much. What I haven't heard a good argument for is why client / server architectures don't replace the need for network transparency.
I'd doubt that any distributions are going to compile out X11 support from Wayland. Why wouldn't they want their distribution to be able to run apps that require X11 that aren't designed for Wayland? Maybe in something like 20 years if essentially all apps have gone to Wayland,... But even then I doubt it. There is always going to be the Linux server culture with remote management and network transparency and running the X11 client is cheap and....
However, I suspect that QT and GTK will within 5 years have calls that offer Wayland only features and the applications will be compiled for those features inside of 10 years and...
The claim of the GP is that VNC would work at all. Your claim is that genuine network transparency is better than VNC. I'm neutral. I think X11 needs to have setting for higher latency and better handling of standard libraries.
But you can't do the sorts of low level hardware things that GDI and Quartz do and be network transparent. It is a real choice between divergent feature sets. It is not a step backwards, it is a step in a different direction.
Wayland still offers X11, so applications that need X11 just don't move over to the new standard. But the fact is that for 2 decades Linux has offered network transparency and there is far less of it used now then when I used it all the time in the early-mid 1990s. Client server with client side rendering has been a vastly more effective paradigm.
It isn't costly in the way the GP said it was. Where it is costly is things have to be designed to be network transparency safe and have extra layers of abstraction. The kinds of behaviors where OS libraries pass information two ways from the GPU and CPU (like in Quartz or GDI) aren't possible. The demo that Steve Jobs did of 32 video streams being hit with graphic effects would be beyond impossible on X11.
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There are laws we are a signatory to passed by the congress tying us heavily to international human rights. This isn't side-stepping congress it is implementing the black letter laws passed by congress for the United states. This is precisely how our system is supposed to work congress passes laws and the executive implements regulations in tune with those laws.
Waco was an example of a group that had shot 4 federal agents trying to administer a court order and then refused to surrender. You don't have the right to violently resist police enforcement. You comply and after the fact sue if there were civil rights violations.
Your analogy of the whisky rebellion is fair.
I had friends at Tahrir square. After they were arrested they were sent to jail for extended periods of time. At occupy they were mainly out within 24 hours with minor fines. In Syria the police are clearing the square with thousands of deaths. In the USA were are upset someone got hit and hospitalized and a few people got hit with tear gas.
We have problems but they are orders of magnitude different. And as an aside, London did assist the Confederate States of America and no we don't like it.
James Risen published highly classified materials. He is not under criminal threat for anything other than failure to obey a court order to reveal sources. One can argue how strongly or not strongly the government should protect journalists who assist espionage, balancing national security against the public's write to know. That is far far different than not having a free society.
Similarly with wikileaks spokespeople. The USA does absolutely nothing to people who are outside the mainstream. You can read communist newspapers to kinist newspapers and they can publish freely. What you are talking about is going beyond dissent as a matter of opinion and instead and taking action to undermine the effectiveness of the government in carrying out actions. Yes that's going to get looked at more harshly.
Well actually a 1/2 million. And they were a secondary cause of 9/11, the primary cause was our support for the Saudi government against their internal rebels.
And this is about computer technology sanctions against Western / US companies not food sanctions against opposed countries.
I don't think so this isn't Microsoft with a complex eco system of interlocking vendors this is Apple with a top down style. If Mac users are being confronted with security threats Apple is going to design a response and focus on developers to rapidly bring their applications up to date. The message is going to be "we are taking care of it, make sure your applications are focused on meeting security standard XYZ because in 47 days..."
The infrastructure is in place for apple to turn the security way up very quickly. What doesn't exist yet is a business need.
If you are a power user you know how to edit the defaults and show these directories.
Except they aren't as vulnerable there is a pretty long history at this point of OSX. Further the ability to move the developer community rapidly, and having a user base that is comfortable with application breakage on OS updates, means that Apple can enhance security. They have also laid a lot of groundwork in terms of security infrastructure for example the defaulting regarding application install and the sandboxing.
A few slips once in a while is substantially different than the same level of problems as windows.
Facebook wasn't buying revenue. Instagram represented 30m users engaged in social networking which would be a terrific way to get Google+ off the ground. Facebook bought to maintain their monopoly. They are going to make some money but honestly it wouldn't have changed the deal much if they had to buy Instagram and burn the business to the ground the next day.
There are technologies for managing IP addresses which are used by large business / complex networks in the IPv4 world that are likely to move downmarket in the IPv6 world. A world where a consumer has 1000 devices trying to interact with one another with complex addressing is not far off. So far the consumer vendors have done a rather excellent job of moving complex networking technologies down to the consumer realm via. good defaults and I think this won't be an exception.
As for a firewall in between. These devices need to tunnel to one another.
Do you know, how many times a similar project was in exactly the same position, and ended up scrapped?
None, I don't remember any similar projects to replace X with this level of support in the last 2 decades. The closest I can think of is the move to change leadership i.e. from xfree86 to x.org.
they are directed to people who consider "porting" good projects (gtk, qt, kde, compiz) to the clusterfuck in the making, thus giving it mindshare.
Those people aren't considering they doing this, rather they at the 1/2 way mark more or less in terms of implementation of allowing Wayland versions that are equally functional, a porting library. That part is going to be done soon. The big step for them is offering Wayland versions that have features not present in the X version. And to convince them not to do that you are going to need reasons not name calling.
Nokia (QT) focus is on cell phones. Being able to offer developers the ability to bring their cell phone applications directly to Windows (GDI) with similar high performance routines. Your feeling is that network transparency is more valuable though you can't articulate a why.
GTK is run out of Gnome whose focus is moving down market on hardware. So similar to QT.
Compiz you don't stand a chance. Wayland is a pure plus for them, besides they are owned by Canonical that is committed to Wayland.
So if you are going to aim at considering it would be the application developer level who have to decide whether to port to Wayland or worse from your perspective, include feature only available in the Wayland library versions, you are going to need to provide them a reason. KDE is more interesting here. First off KDE doesn't make meaningful use of network transparency, so that's not a huge loss, and again that's something your argument to deal with. However, breaking compatibility with X11 would be a huge step for KDE. The whole "fragmenting the Unix market..." argument that is also being raised is going to have some level of inherent support. But at the same time better compatibility with the native window systems of OSX and Windows is a huge plus and that will have inherent support. I think the later fragmentation is worse for them than the former. Moreover I suspect that is KDE and Gnome move to Wayland all the other Unixes will follow them. So ultimately the only counter argument is going to be that if KDE and Gnome move away from X11 it will become a legacy technology and network transparency lost for a generation.
Which means you need to address the importance of network transparency. Because you are saying to those library and GUI providers they should make major sacrifices in their strategic goals to preserve network transparency. For that argument to carry weight you need to be able to articulate why network transparency is vital. And in particular, since it is obviously not vital now, why you would expect a reversal of the trend away from using network transparency.
It is off the ground. The alpha already handles Clutter and EFL are done. X, GTK, QT have partially working versions, buggy as heck but running apps. Ubuntu and Fedora are planning to switch. KDE is working on a direct to Wayland compile. Compiz has already isolated the X based code. The system is still swamped with bugs and thus might fail but it is well past getting off the ground.
And I urge you to consider, the people you consider ignorant or arrogant are the people who care about the display server. If you can't make a valid argument to them you aren't going to be able to make an argument to others. So do what you want. But if argument is going to matter at all, most likely is going to be network transparency is so important that distributions shouldn't move over to Wayland even though it offers advantages. If there is an argument there you probably have less than 3 years to make it.
Again you can do what you want. But the questions I raised in this thread are the ones anyone who cares enough about the issue are going to raise.
QT has binding to widget sets from many languages as does GDK. If you want to use a non standard language, particularly one where you want non standard primitives (i.e. you want thing other than integer, string... to be first class objects) QT makes it easy. Interesting enough one of the obvious areas that this sort of application makes sense is programming language GUIs. For example the dynamic language GUI problem hasn't been solved since "evaluatable statements" is a complex context specific idea while statements in static languages are not nearly so complex.
write-once, run-anywhere is the biggest load of bullshit to ever appear in computing
write-once, run anywhere obviously does work the website you are on is a good example of that. Windows, OSX, and Linux users all experience roughly the same thing. The issue is that this application is of fairly limited complexity. As application complexity increases platform specific features become desirable. However, the vast majority, possibly overwhelming majority of applications are simple.
If Wayland remains vaporware it isn't a problem. The issue is when it becomes a real system. And the counter argument to the real system is network transparency. So yeah you do have to defend why network transparency is worth the cost, given it not becoming a successful distributed application paradigm.
No one disagrees X11 has been the dominant system for 3 decades. What they are disagreeing about, and started disagreeing about even by the early 1990s was whether that was a good thing.
Linux has been the desktop leader on *nix since the 1990s. While Wayland itself is Linux only there is no reason other *nix can't move to via. a porting effort. So I would expect to see something like Wayland-Quartz just as there is XQuartz today. That is if Wayland takes off it will become the dominant desktop system for all the *nix IMHO. There obviously will be something a transition bump, but there will likely be little reason to run the X11 Server over the Wayland Client, so I assume most distributions will move quickly. That is because Wayland is backwards compatible the move on the client side is easy.
It shouldn't be bad.
There is plenty of data here we don't have to use anecdotes on individual women. When we start talking about women in the tens of millions, yes they are the large screen demographic.
As for Windows phones and hardware diversity. Agreed. They aren't the major competitor to Apple at the moment.
. As a result, IMO Android will become a phone for the cheap and those that do very little.
You are forgetting a 3rd demographic those that want hardware diversity. For example Androids with large screen are really popular with women who carry their phone in their purse and want a mini tablet experience. Cheap was the first demographic (i.e. people wanted low end hardware).
The real interesting issue is whether hardware diversity will be a positive enough experience to compensate for the lack of quality in the total experience. I suspect not, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.
There have been lots of articles on that. It depends what you want to include. Apple spends a lot more on advertising because the manufacturers generally cobrand with the carriers. Apple spends much more on development. Apple is starting to subsidize manufacturers of parts, especially memory. Samsung uses its own manufacturing facilities and Motorola its own chips. Apple owns its own stores. Apple runs their warranty program at a loss while the Android carriers don't. Apple has crossover marketing opportunities that the other manufacturers don't so even comparing advertising costs is complex.
So it really isn't if you will excuse the pun, an apples to apples comparison. In general though, Apple's margins are higher. Gross margins of about 50% vs. 60% on high end phones. On lower end phones the margins fall for both of them. For example on the 3G Apple isn't just giving up the $200 in price but another $50+ (over 2 years) in subsidy. They aren't saving nearly $250 on cheaper parts and lower support costs. And this drives margins down to around 20-30%.
On the other hand Android OS costs are much higher than Apple's. Android allows for much greater carrier customization and much greater device diversity. On the upside Android costs are mostly born by the carriers as a way to upsell other features.
If you are interested Google, there is a lot out there on this. But easy comparisons are facile.
If ANY application that user has to use remotely is not usable over the network, then ALL of them are unusable over the network, and the user is forced to use "remote desktop" to run all of them in a pseudo-desktop window.
That's not true. You can use network transparency for some applications and a virtual desktop for others, just have more than one connection. Moreover these may not be happening at the same time.
My whole point is that we should not allow development of applications with sabotaged network transparency. The author won't notice if he used a new whiz-bang toolkit and his application is now "local only", but the user will, and I do not want to be faced with applications built with this kind of sabotaged libraries in toolkits in my work, just because someone used a nice-looking library while being unaware how it hurts users.
First off I can't imagine using many if any applications where the choice of client architecture wasn't decided rather deliberately. So I don't agree applications authors will be unaware of this choice to move towards local only, I think it will be a quite deliberate choice to take advantage of features only available on the local libraries.
I understand your point, you consider network transparency vital. But if you want to convince people, you have to explain why network transparency is so lightly used. Why is it that Citrix (remote desktop) seems to be the remote system of choice and not Unix based solutions? Why is it that most applications are designed for client / server either thick client or web? OSX has been in what is pretty close to the post Wayland world now for ten years with xquartz included in the OS. And yet I can't think of a single major application that considers X11 a value add. When Unix apps are ported they generally port in via. X11 and then almost immediately create an Aqua interface. Remote applications that can't be delivered via. Aqua or thick clients use Flash, Java, AJAX. If network transparency were genuinely highly valuable over remote desktop we would see more of it being used in practice.
You and I are on a discussion board with a high number of Linux users and essentially everyone on this board is technology knowledgeable enough to use X11 on windows. The developers have pushed towards additional functionality they haven't chosen to ever offer a thick client with network transparent access. Why not?
On LInux where everyone's native GUI has full support for network transparency the overwhelming amount of application usage is applications running with the same machine being the XServer and XClient, that is not using transparency. Even Linux shops don't make much use of it anymore. The fact is that Unixes have had network transparency since the mid 1980s. End users just don't use it very much. It hasn't turned out to be a killer feature, I thought in the 1990s that it would be when I compared networking on Unixes to technologies like Windows for Workgroups. But X isn't all that much better 18 years later and Windows / OSX networking is. The fact is that X11 is optimized for hardware X servers, and those don't exist anymore. X11 simply hasn't been able to migrate to new technologies and as a result server side rendering has had no advantages that are used in practice in any large scale way.
End users aren't meaningfully harmed by dropping network transparency.
I can think of a lot of reasons X11 failed:
a) The fragmentation between the major unix vendors
b) The fact that high speed client libraries like NeWS / 4sight never got fully integrated.
c) The conservatism of the x86free management people, with respect to feature enhancements and a lost year or two.
d) The hostility towards QT which prevent QT from being directly integrated.
e) And probably most importantly the move towards a more secure internet. The days when rlogin, rcp and rsh were common and xservers ran with low security so you could throw windows where ever you wanted are over.
High latency connections are absolutely a requirement. The whole direction for the last 2 decades in terms of outsourcing the data center and now cloud computing has been to deliver servers via. a WAN. MPLS reduce jitter and latency but still not enough to get LAN like performance. IPv6 will likely reduce latency but it will still be years before IPv6 can be assumed. An application solution that doesn't work well with WAN is unacceptable.
This is one of the reasons that network transparency did not become a killer feature for Linux. Even Linux apps have had to use a Client / Server approach.
Wayland developers have no intention of support X but they can bundle it in their window manager. The same way that Apple bundles an X11/quartz-wm with Aqua. Apple only supports the compatibility part, major advances in X11 pass through to Apple because mostly they just compile off the shelf x.org X11. Wayland AFAIK will do the same thing.
As far as applications for Wayland.
a) Those that need to be network transparent will use X11 standards.
b) Those that need performance will use the Wayland standards.
that leaves about 90% of the applications. Obviously in the early years those apps will be X11 however if Wayland is unsuccessful then they will likely become Wayland apps as the libraries move over, i.e. for no particular reason.
If you are saying that Wayland applications won't be usable with an X11 Server running directly against the OS, i.e. X11 not running inside Wayland, yes absolutely that's the intention. Wayland applications will not have X11 compatibility the same way GDI or Aqua applications can't run directly against X11. That's the intention. Wayland aims to replace X11 for desktop usage. There is no question the goal is to retire X11.
We can imagine a world, say in 2030 where Wayland has been successful. Libraries moved over to first start Wayland and later GUI libraries introduced Wayland only features that couldn't be implemented in X11. So applications start casually using features that prevent effective network transparency even those that would benefit from network transparency. In which case I'd assume those applications become client / server the way they are on Windows and OSX today. I certainly remember using network transparency a lot 1988-1995 or so, it worked wonderfully for dumb terminals. As you've mentioned X11 itself and X11 applications don't handle latency well and so using network transparency over a WAN has been less than pleasant. I like it on LANs but still don't use it all that much. What I haven't heard a good argument for is why client / server architectures don't replace the need for network transparency.
I'd doubt that any distributions are going to compile out X11 support from Wayland. Why wouldn't they want their distribution to be able to run apps that require X11 that aren't designed for Wayland? Maybe in something like 20 years if essentially all apps have gone to Wayland,... But even then I doubt it. There is always going to be the Linux server culture with remote management and network transparency and running the X11 client is cheap and....
However, I suspect that QT and GTK will within 5 years have calls that offer Wayland only features and the applications will be compiled for those features inside of 10 years and...
So it will come down to applications IMHO.
The claim of the GP is that VNC would work at all. Your claim is that genuine network transparency is better than VNC. I'm neutral. I think X11 needs to have setting for higher latency and better handling of standard libraries.
But you can't do the sorts of low level hardware things that GDI and Quartz do and be network transparent. It is a real choice between divergent feature sets. It is not a step backwards, it is a step in a different direction.
Wayland still offers X11, so applications that need X11 just don't move over to the new standard. But the fact is that for 2 decades Linux has offered network transparency and there is far less of it used now then when I used it all the time in the early-mid 1990s. Client server with client side rendering has been a vastly more effective paradigm.
It isn't costly in the way the GP said it was. Where it is costly is things have to be designed to be network transparency safe and have extra layers of abstraction. The kinds of behaviors where OS libraries pass information two ways from the GPU and CPU (like in Quartz or GDI) aren't possible. The demo that Steve Jobs did of 32 video streams being hit with graphic effects would be beyond impossible on X11.