It's been a while since I used Debian but I remember stock debian installs already pretty much fitting this description. You had to turn on the contrib and non-free apt sources to get anything proprietary. Has this changed?
That's GM! And GM is unatural! Unatural is evil! Burn witch burn!
The only way to fix the world's hunger problems is population reduction! But.. sex is natural! Oh my Gaia, what do we do? I know! Chemical sterilization! That's natural right?
"LXDE is in the process of becoming LXQt. It fully intends to support remote using Qt's system."
That's interesting. I'm glad people will still have a sort of lightweight choice. I'm not really an LXDE user myself though. I just use the task bar from LXDE. I suppose I was being overly garrulous in mentioning that part of my setup.
" Stump isn't really a window manager as much as a programming exercise demonstrating how to do windows management in LISP."
That's an interesting statement. The author wrote Ratpoison first. His big motivation there was he wanted a GUI that didn't require a mouse. He was a big Emacs guy and used to having Lisp as part of his environment to work with. He found he was building Lisp like abilities into Ratpoison so he decided it made more sense to do a re-write this time using Lisp from the start. At least that's what the website says. Whenever I look for Lisp configuration help online the questions and answers I read sound like other users are actually using Stumpwm as their main window manager. I've never seen anything to indicate that it is only a programming excercise!
Personally, I use it because it is tiling. I used to really like Konqueror in KDE. I used it's split-screen feature a lot. You could run a terminal in the bottom. I used to run emacs in that, edit PHP code and have the page I am working on displayed in the window above. It also worked as a file manager, with scp support so I would have a second tab for uploading image files and stuff like that.
When KDE started pushing their new browser over Konqueror at first I thought my preferred way of working was going away. I read people's arguments about it, stating that Konqueror was no good because it tried to be too many things.. counter to the Unix philosophy. i suppose they were right. I realized that what I really wanted was tiling. That's basically what I was using Konqueror for.. a tiling Window manager. That's what Stump is to me now, not a Lisp exercise. As a bonus.. where before I was running my text editor in Konqueror's terminal, now I get to run the GUI version of it!
Maybe what I need to do is learn to write my own compositor. I don't want to do that. I have sooo many projects I am already working on and no idea where to even start. Contrary to how it might seem i am not married to the idea of X forever. i just don't want to lose any features, only gain them.
"Yes. There are many solutions. Apple's built in Messages application does this. http://mightytext.net/ works for Android."
Thanks, I will check that out.
"$.03/hr in electricity over a WAN (wired LAN is close to 0)."
For remote X I mostly use wired LAN. I value the fact that I can do remote X over the Wan but I do mostly use VNC for that.
I don't like Wifi much because we have too many neighbors using it and causing interference. I prefer non-portable wired terminals in heavy use spots. Of course we use wifi with portable devices like tablets but I'm ok with VNC on those anyway.
I mostly use remote X as a way to access the computer in my den in my workshop. Yes, I know, i could install VNC. I really like that just turn it on and go, the illusion that the PCs in the workshop and in the den are one and the same. I have additional small, old cash register PCs that I intend to eventually set up the same way as a media PC in the livingroom and maybe in the kitchen for looking up recipes and stuff like that. Yes, I know, this is kind of a 1950s-70s retro-future image of computing. It's better than maintaining a bunch of separate desktops. Todays tablets and etc... are awesome but there is still something to be said for full size monitors, keyboards and mice. I think there would be a lot to gain if thin-clients were to become more mainstream.
It's also nice to be able to point out that using open source software allows me to create a custom setup like this. Even if you don't like my setup.. you can implement YOUR favorite setup. I can customize it the
>> Any toolkit can have Wayland remoting. That's going to be a standard part of writing new toolkits in say 10 years.
Ah.. but I thought remote access was a niche application, no longer relevant enough for developers to care about? That's what I am hearing when Wayland supporters say that 'nobody' is using it. It's too niche for Wayland and yet widespread enough that each toolkit will bother to implement it all on their own? I really don't get that. And why should they, each one would be re-inventing the same wheel!
"That's session sharing. What's better is not remoting the conversation to the computer but that the computer syncs with the phone and has a copy of the conversations at all times. Many messaging systems already provide that. I do that today. No reason to remote just push the data."
By texting I mean SMS. You have something that lets you do that from your computer? It's not like I am going to force all my friends and family to switch to Hangouts or Skype or something like that just so I can type easier.
"Yes when your main OS changes toolkits (something like KDE 5 to 6) you will need to update your dumb images to match but that's not hard in your scenario."
i don't even use KDE or Gnome. I use Stumpwm along with the pager from Lxde. Am i going to have to install Gnome just so that I can remotely access GTK apps and KDE so I can remotely access QT ones? Is there any room for a variety of window/desktop managers, especially lightweight ones in a Wayland world? Even if I was still using KDE (I used that for years) I don't think i would want to see Linux change in a way that FORCES users onto one of the big two. On top of that, i have it all compiled from scratch (Gentoo) so that it runs nicely on my older equipment. That's another reason I don't want Gnome+KDE on the dumb terminals. Neither of KDE or Gnome is going to fit on the CF cards I was describing to you anyway. I'm not just complaining so that I can keep MY setup. Why keep upping the hardware requirements when we have a working solution already? Aren't the landfills full enough?
i guess there is TFTP but that is frankly a pain in the ass. To use that you have to set up your own custom DHCP server rather than just use either a commercially available router or a simple router distro.
"Your hypothetical application author has to have chosen an obscure modern toolkit which doesn't remote."
Availability of choice is something that has made Linux great for a very long time. Will there be no future development in this area? Is it going to be QT/GTK forever?
"If you are an end user what do you care what sits on the hard drive?"
Because I'm the one who has to put it there. Hey, remember when Linux was a 'hobbyist OS'? We still aren't all technicians setting up labs for an employer somewhere. Some of us actually use Linux at home still!
You seem to care about security. That's part of why I want my clients thin. The fewer things installed on them the fewer things need to be locked down. Ideally I want a very small display server and just enough underlying OS to run it.
"So if you want to be remoting on a LAN not WAN, have a not quite dumb terminal but a Linux box"
Yes! Yes! Absolutely! Is that not what I have been describing? Was i somehow not clear about it? Actually.. I'd go for a real dumb terminal except old PCs are essentially free and the only dumb terminals I know of are old CRT beasts with no audio support. My remote devices are tiny PCs that I think used to be cash registers. They run off of wallwarts, have no fans and came without hard drives. I added CF cards rather than real hard drives to keep noise, heat and power consumption down while eliminating moving parts.
", forcing Unix to emulate hardware configurations that no one has used for two decades."
See! I told you Wayland supporters were rude. You are calling me 'Nobody'! Go look at other forums discussing this topic. Apparently this 'nobody' is not alone!
You aren't even addressing the fact that I already said I don't really care about X11. I care about remote functionality. Providing network support at a layer between the toolkits and what Wayland provides would be fine by me so long as it meant that this layer was what the toolkits or applications are coded to talk to, not Wayland directly. That way ALL applications could still be remoted. And.. if that layer used similar methods to what X11 used to provide remote access or something entirely different or even used multiple methods, chosen by the application to best suite the kind of content being displayed... that's all ok by me!
"I don't know you tell me. Wayland is a different but better method of getting display data from one place to the other and yet you object to changing it. So why?"
Because.. as it seems to be proposed Wayland is NOT a way to get ALL display data from one place to another. That is outside of Wayland's scope. With remote support moved to the toolkit or application level we only get remote support where someone chose to support that feature. The old system meant EVERYTHING could be displayed remotely. I only want the baby saved, you can pitch the bathwater.
>>>>"To do both of what? Display both kinds of applications remotely?" >>"Have a display system that both shares and doesn't share buffers. And as far as remoting to properly the same remoting strategy. One is designed for strategies the other doesn't support and vise versa."
Ok, I know the word buffer to mean an area of memory. Basically a big array containing pixel data. Why do I care if remote support is implemented in one big array or a dozen? Hey.. either way.. knock yourself out. Do whichever works better.
Do you mean something different when you say this? Are you saying that we can't have both full desktop remote access and also be able to remote single applications? I do this in Windows with RDP every day at work! On one monitor I display a terminal server desktop to run Visual Studio. i display the full desktop because Visual Studio spins off lots of child windows and that doesn't work as well if I just display Visual Studio remotely. At the same time I am displaying Navicat, running on that same terminal server but by itself, outside of the desktop. it shows up in my local taskbar... it's ju
Is remote display unimportant because there are more people who only run locally? Remote display is somewhat of a fringe thing. But.. so is all Desktop Linux. We are here BECAUSE we are on the fringe. If we weren't we would be on Windows or OSX! Desktop Linux is painful. People are always sending documents, videos, etc.. that require special effort to install proprietary codecs or run semi-functional applications in Wine. If you are sticking to Linux on the desktop then there is probably already some fringe feature you love or rely on or you wouldn't be here. What happens if one day it goes away? If any fringe users of Linux are going to be written off as not significant then you might as well pack it up because we are all fringe users in one way or another.
A local Gnome? A local KDE? My main purpose for running remotely is to NOT have to install and maintain all that baggage in multiple locations. At that point one might as well just set up a NAS to hold their home directories and install the full set of software on every computer. But.. then.. might as well just run Windows. That's how just about every Windows shop office is set up. At that point how does Linux provide something unique?
"It isn't possible to do both."
To do both of what? Display both kinds of applications remotely? Or use two different underlying implementations? It can't all go through one buffer AND go through separate buffers. Ok. Maybe I should say this.. I don't really care about X11 the protocol vs Wayland vs the display protocol of that Mac compatible OS the aliens used in Independence Day. I'm not arguing for or against keeping the underlying architecture behind remote or local display unchanged. X11 serves me well although I am quite aware it is not perfect. If a different method of getting the display data from one place to another works better then why would I be against changing it?
Wayland supporters often say that X11 network transparency or remote display or whatever is already broken. OK. My limited understanding is that as originally intended an application told X to draw a shape or add text, etc.. what got passed over TCP/IP was the command to do so, not a raster graphic of the shape. What I gather from the various pro Wayland posts is that under the hood various hacks have mostly replaced this and now everything is getting drawn at some higher level and passed as bitmap. Ok. But when I go to use an application remotely IT STILL DISPLAYS. In fact, now I have VirtualGL installed so I suppose that has things rendering entirely outside of X and just streaming through as bitmap. But.. it is working! Actually, I love the idea of doing 3d applications this way. Let me build up ONE client that has ONE big honking video card and play video games on it but displayed elsewhere without making me invest in a house full of GPUs.
But that isn't what I came to talk about. It's the interface that I am interested in. I just want to be able to tell the current session that my display is over here. And it all displays. If I feel like doing this with a single application at a time.. I want that to work. If I want to remote display my desktop environment.. then that should work too. If I open a desktop environment remotely.. then when i open something within that environment it should display there. X forced this. When you linked against X-libs it didn't matter if you were actually linking against GTK or QT or ____ which in turn linked against X libs or even if you coded directly to X libs. Implementing remote display at a lower level meant everything had it.
So.. different methods of remote display are needed for different applications. So what? I don't see how that still can't be implemented at a lower (and thus common) level. just give it a default implementation that may not be the most efficient but at least works. If the application or toolkit programmers don't care about remote access then it falls into that by default. Big deal.. at least for LAN users it probably doesn't matter anyway. If s
"Well yes it does result in a fractured feature. They Wayland people see the fracturing as a plus."
So does this mean that I wouldn't be able to say remotely display a desktop environment which uses QT and within that click a shortcut to a GTK app and expect it to open and be managed by that QT desktop environment.
That is the functionality we have now. Once you have your desktop environment displaying remotely everything you do looks and feels local. How can you have that when each app may have a different remote implementation?
>> Talking about Wayland not having remoting implying that Wayland applications won't remote isn't fair not accurate.
Yes it is. In my previous statement I chose QT and GTK as examples because they are so common. A user could have any number of applications using any number of GUI toolkits. Assuming they will all bother to implement their own remote access would way over-optimistic.
>> a) Supporters of network transparency don't know what network transparency is
There are many levels to look at things. You can look at electrons traveling through silicon or the behaviors of transistors combining to form logic gates. Skipping a lot of levels, further up you get all these software buffers, etc.. that Wayland supporters like to talk about. Some levels up from that there is an end user who sets their DISPLAY variable or runs "xorg -query ", etc.. and gets remote access to their desktop. Wayland supporters keep talking about those buffers and other low level things and saying that what goes on at that level isn't really network transparency. Ok. But the user doesn't care! I know I don't!
" You have to make choices. Deciding to help you is deciding to harm others. People who want better games (and BTW I don't game) are making the same argument you are in reverse."
If I can watch a high definition video feed in real time over the internet then I should be able to remotely display a desktop or a user should be able to remotely display a game. The two should not be mutually exclusive. Surely it is possible to fix this in a way that pleases the gamer without screwing it up for the remote desktop user.
You probably are thinking I just proved your point but I did not. I said we should be able to remotely display our DESKTOPS. Not just individual programs. I should be able to see my favorite desktop manager and click shortcuts within it without worrying about which toolkit each uses. It should just work.. just like it does now.
Before you say.. VNC... nope. That is not the same. I use both remote X and VNC. My remote X server is configured to automatically connect when I turn it on. (It just runs xorg -query ) The very first thing I see is a login screen where I can log in as any user of the client computer. If I happen to have changed out the monitor.. well.. auto detection will have already adjusted my resolution accordingly.
I have three VNC sessions running in the background at all times. Two run under my login. One is just the perfect dimensions for my Lapdock. The other is the perfect dimensions for my iPad and happens to be usable though not great on my monitor at work. The third session runs as my daughter's user for her to log in. Most of the time all 3 are unused and yet all 3 are running because otherwise I would have to ssh in first and start them before I could use them.
" but there are many capable developers who deal with that kind of specialty "
Capable of developing a display server? Really? Why?
Until recently pretty much every *nix used X. Of course Windows and Mac also exist, clearly somebody develops those. There are a few outliers like Syllable & ReactOS. All in all I would think that the number of display servers or non-server systems serving that purpose could be counted on one's fingers.
If that's true... why would there be a bunch of available developers with the knowledge to do such things. What are they already working on and why?
"They do agree remote usage is an important feature and it is something they intend to add." "They do agree it is something on their todo list."
Are you privy to something that I am not? According to the FAQ it is out of scope. I've watched the videos... all I see are statements that it is someone else's problem and that X doesn't do remote anymore anyway.* Wayland developers and supporters have even suggested that networking support be moved to the GUI toolkits. Surely that would result in a fractured feature that works differently on some applications than others and probably not at all on some.
Also... on the To Do list? Wayland is already being pushed in production. This should not happen with basic features still on the "To Do" list. I'm not sure if there are any desktop distros defaulting to it but there is Tizen. I for one have been looking forward to being able to remote display applications from my desktop on my phone or vice versa ever since I used my old Sharp Zaurus! Do you think it's too impractical on the small screen? I often worked this way on the Z'. I even occasionally did real work with SSH on a 3x2" screen with T9 keyboard Nokia Series 60 phone back in the day.
"A respectful comment from the anti-Wayland side! Well done."
I do not believe that there has been much respect coming from the pro-Wayland side. The attitude from the developers seems to be.. you are a minority.. you don't matter. The stuff you care about doesn't work now anyway (even though you are currently using it without problem) Non-developer Wayland supporters are even worse, accusing people who are concerned about remote display of being Neck Beards that are holding them back from getting 3d video acceleration. If the anti-Wayland side seems disrespectful perhaps it should be viewed as a natural response by a community under attack.
* - As Xorg developers I'm sure they know what they are talking about regarding X not doing remote anymore... on a developer level. So it's not really using the X protocol as originally intended when I display something remotely or something like that. As a user I really don't care. I just know that my application is displaying remotely. In other words... it just works.
"Remember that applications, especially those that are often used remotely, are likely to be somewhat delayed in how long before they switch to Wayland only versions."
To me it's not the ability to remote those applications that makes X great. It's the ability to remote the ones that most people would never even think of remoting.
Today the cloud is all the rage. The market is demanding it not just the 'geeks'. For an application that truly begs remoting I think the question isn't does the operating system support remoting it's "why doesn't the application have a built in web interface?!"/ (to the lay user X or Wayland is a part of the OS)
To me the fact that X allows me to display applications that the author never wanted me to display remotely is awesome. It's part of a broader environment of "I get to decide" what features are useful to me, not an application author, not the market or anyone else. This is generally the way Linux has worked until recently. For a system that makes these decisions for you, where the things a typical user would want just work a Windows or Macintosh desktop would be just fine. That need is already filled!
That is not to imply that it is only important to me on a basis of ideology. I happen to use a remote X terminal myself. i use it as though it were just another face of my main PC, not as a way to run specific, specially remote-worthy applications. It's a way that I can have one and only one highly customized desktop to babysit and yet have it in multiple places.
Keep in mind this is pretty low level stuff. We aren't talking about coding yet another mp3 player (which is just a frontend for lame). We are talking about hardware drivers, video backend stuff, network protocols... I am a 'developer' myself but I would have absolutely no idea where to even begin working on something like this. Just listening to the Wayland developers talk about the internals of X vs Wayland and why Wayland is better gets me lost after a paragraph or two at most.
The population out there that is capable of working on a problem like this is probably much smaller than the population that might contribute to other aspects of open source software. Of those few that are qualified apparently none use this feature even though many of the rest of us depend on it.
Then distros will suddenly standardize on Wayland. Soon after X versions of applications will not be available. Then.. bye bye remote display. Were you still using that? If so then you are just a neck beard who is afraid of change and was holding up progress so that some poor kid's video game ran a couple of FPS slower. Your features don't matter but the gamer's needs do matter. I guess that makes sense seeing that video games are the only life many of those sorry slobs will ever experience anyway...
As an actual user, not just a developer talking about protocols try actually setting that up and using it. Supposedly that code is in the main branch but there is ZERO documentation about how to make it work. From what I have heard one of the developers wrote it in order to try to shut up all the people who were rightly complaining that a major feature from X was being taken away. Once he had a single demo it then went by the wayside. Does that code even work any more? Who knows, how would one even find out?
As far as I can tell remote Wayland was developed only far enough to be a publicity stunt and doesn't really exist in a usable state.
"If you need anything X of the above, or want to keep using xfwm, wayland already has a X-window server, so you can keep using it."
Which will mean squat if applications eventually stop supporting X.
"X network layer is super inefficient sending frames".... so. It's always better than nothing and actually not bad over a LAN. As a developer you may be able to pick apart a million things it is doing wrong but as a user all I see is something that works verses something that doesn't even offer the same functionality.
"VNC is much better for anything else."
VNC, at least in any implementation that is available for a user to download is a solution to an entirely different problem. If you want to occasionally access an entire desktop remotely inside a window from another computer then sure, VNC is great. I just wish someone would implement sound support and built-in encryption so I wouldn't have to bother with SSH tunnels.
Where is VNC's solution for bringing displaying a single application remotely so that it seems to be running locally? Where is VNC's solution to creating a permanent remote terminal complete with login window?
It removed pesky features (such as remote display). Features like that ruin the simple appearance of pre-internet technology that is all the rage today.
-- ok, I have heard that one of the Wayland developers did some sort of remote display testing but as far as I can tell you have to pull his personal git fork, build it yourself and you get no documentation if you want to try to use it.
Brasero doesn't even find the burner until you install a bunch of Gnome stuff. Sure, you can still chose a different window or desktop manager and run Brasero but you still have to install a huge chunk of Gnome before it works!
In a pouch that clips to my belt. Not very stylish, I know but hey.. I'm already married, not trying to impress the girls. I can wear a shirt that hangs down and covers it 1/2 the year anyway.
My front pockets are for my wallet on one side, keys on the other. Nothing goes in the back ones for me to sit on unless it's thin like a piece of paper! I also keep my leatherman in with the phone giving me two reasons to keep wearing that.
A lot of my stuff IS that old. So long as you aren't using it for gaming hardware from back then was still pretty fast. Well.. 90% or more of what I do can be done with a web browser and a text editor so... what more do I need?
I still burn optical discs of Youtube videos to play in our DVD player for my daughter. Also, at least half of the computers I have to deal with, although their BIOSs have a boot from USB option it never works. A bootable CD... that always does the trick.
Umm...dedicated burner programs (in Linux) is exactly what I was talking about when you responded that Windows can do this. So... I explained why it does not.
It's a good thing there are still people like you out there. If people couldn't keep their phones in their pockets think of all those mall-kiosk workers who repair cracked screens that would be out of a job! They would have nothing to do besides aimlessly wander up and down the isles... it would be Mallrats I tell you, Mallrats!
Seriously, keeping a smartphone in a pocket is stupid.
Sure, for a basic data disc. It's not much harder with good ol' Xcdroast.
What does Windows explorer do if you drag music files onto it. Do you get an audio CD? (honestly I'm asking cause I don't know) If so, what formats, does it handle ogg?
Now lets see you drag a bunch of video files into explorer(it's family stuff you recorded with your cellphone right? surely i'm not talking about piracy here) Do you get something that you can pop into your DVD player and have a reasonable expectation that it will actually play?
Mixed mode discs? Finalized or un-finalized RWs?
My point is that there is a lot more to a decent burner program than just dragging some files onto a disc.
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It's been a while since I used Debian but I remember stock debian installs already pretty much fitting this description. You had to turn on the contrib and non-free apt sources to get anything proprietary. Has this changed?
Freedom from porn. No proprietary codecs....
That's GM! And GM is unatural! Unatural is evil! Burn witch burn!
The only way to fix the world's hunger problems is population reduction! But.. sex is natural! Oh my Gaia, what do we do? I know! Chemical sterilization! That's natural right?
"LXDE is in the process of becoming LXQt. It fully intends to support remote using Qt's system."
That's interesting. I'm glad people will still have a sort of lightweight choice. I'm not really an LXDE user myself though. I just use the task bar from LXDE. I suppose I was being overly garrulous in mentioning that part of my setup.
" Stump isn't really a window manager as much as a programming exercise demonstrating how to do windows management in LISP."
That's an interesting statement. The author wrote Ratpoison first. His big motivation there was he wanted a GUI that didn't require a mouse. He was a big Emacs guy and used to having Lisp as part of his environment to work with. He found he was building Lisp like abilities into Ratpoison so he decided it made more sense to do a re-write this time using Lisp from the start. At least that's what the website says. Whenever I look for Lisp configuration help online the questions and answers I read sound like other users are actually using Stumpwm as their main window manager. I've never seen anything to indicate that it is only a programming excercise!
Personally, I use it because it is tiling. I used to really like Konqueror in KDE. I used it's split-screen feature a lot. You could run a terminal in the bottom. I used to run emacs in that, edit PHP code and have the page I am working on displayed in the window above. It also worked as a file manager, with scp support so I would have a second tab for uploading image files and stuff like that.
When KDE started pushing their new browser over Konqueror at first I thought my preferred way of working was going away. I read people's arguments about it, stating that Konqueror was no good because it tried to be too many things.. counter to the Unix philosophy. i suppose they were right. I realized that what I really wanted was tiling. That's basically what I was using Konqueror for.. a tiling Window manager. That's what Stump is to me now, not a Lisp exercise. As a bonus.. where before I was running my text editor in Konqueror's terminal, now I get to run the GUI version of it!
Maybe what I need to do is learn to write my own compositor. I don't want to do that. I have sooo many projects I am already working on and no idea where to even start. Contrary to how it might seem i am not married to the idea of X forever. i just don't want to lose any features, only gain them.
"Yes. There are many solutions. Apple's built in Messages application does this. http://mightytext.net/ works for Android."
Thanks, I will check that out.
"$.03/hr in electricity over a WAN (wired LAN is close to 0)."
For remote X I mostly use wired LAN. I value the fact that I can do remote X over the Wan but I do mostly use VNC for that.
I don't like Wifi much because we have too many neighbors using it and causing interference. I prefer non-portable wired terminals in heavy use spots. Of course we use wifi with portable devices like tablets but I'm ok with VNC on those anyway.
I mostly use remote X as a way to access the computer in my den in my workshop. Yes, I know, i could install VNC. I really like that just turn it on and go, the illusion that the PCs in the workshop and in the den are one and the same. I have additional small, old cash register PCs that I intend to eventually set up the same way as a media PC in the livingroom and maybe in the kitchen for looking up recipes and stuff like that. Yes, I know, this is kind of a 1950s-70s retro-future image of computing. It's better than maintaining a bunch of separate desktops. Todays tablets and etc... are awesome but there is still something to be said for full size monitors, keyboards and mice. I think there would be a lot to gain if thin-clients were to become more mainstream.
It's also nice to be able to point out that using open source software allows me to create a custom setup like this. Even if you don't like my setup.. you can implement YOUR favorite setup. I can customize it the
>> Any toolkit can have Wayland remoting. That's going to be a standard part of writing new toolkits in say 10 years.
Ah.. but I thought remote access was a niche application, no longer relevant enough for developers to care about? That's what I am hearing when Wayland supporters say that 'nobody' is using it. It's too niche for Wayland and yet widespread enough that each toolkit will bother to implement it all on their own? I really don't get that. And why should they, each one would be re-inventing the same wheel!
"That's session sharing. What's better is not remoting the conversation to the computer but that the computer syncs with the phone and has a copy of the conversations at all times. Many messaging systems already provide that. I do that today. No reason to remote just push the data."
By texting I mean SMS. You have something that lets you do that from your computer? It's not like I am going to force all my friends and family to switch to Hangouts or Skype or something like that just so I can type easier.
"Yes when your main OS changes toolkits (something like KDE 5 to 6) you will need to update your dumb images to match but that's not hard in your scenario."
i don't even use KDE or Gnome. I use Stumpwm along with the pager from Lxde. Am i going to have to install Gnome just so that I can remotely access GTK apps and KDE so I can remotely access QT ones? Is there any room for a variety of window/desktop managers, especially lightweight ones in a Wayland world? Even if I was still using KDE (I used that for years) I don't think i would want to see Linux change in a way that FORCES users onto one of the big two. On top of that, i have it all compiled from scratch (Gentoo) so that it runs nicely on my older equipment. That's another reason I don't want Gnome+KDE on the dumb terminals. Neither of KDE or Gnome is going to fit on the CF cards I was describing to you anyway. I'm not just complaining so that I can keep MY setup. Why keep upping the hardware requirements when we have a working solution already? Aren't the landfills full enough?
i guess there is TFTP but that is frankly a pain in the ass. To use that you have to set up your own custom DHCP server rather than just use either a commercially available router or a simple router distro.
"Your hypothetical application author has to have chosen an obscure modern toolkit which doesn't remote."
Availability of choice is something that has made Linux great for a very long time. Will there be no future development in this area? Is it going to be QT/GTK forever?
"If you are an end user what do you care what sits on the hard drive?"
Because I'm the one who has to put it there. Hey, remember when Linux was a 'hobbyist OS'? We still aren't all technicians setting up labs for an employer somewhere. Some of us actually use Linux at home still!
You seem to care about security. That's part of why I want my clients thin. The fewer things installed on them the fewer things need to be locked down. Ideally I want a very small display server and just enough underlying OS to run it.
"So if you want to be remoting on a LAN not WAN, have a not quite dumb terminal but a Linux box"
Yes! Yes! Absolutely! Is that not what I have been describing? Was i somehow not clear about it? Actually.. I'd go for a real dumb terminal except old PCs are essentially free and the only dumb terminals I know of are old CRT beasts with no audio support. My remote devices are tiny PCs that I think used to be cash registers. They run off of wallwarts, have no fans and came without hard drives. I added CF cards rather than real hard drives to keep noise, heat and power consumption down while eliminating moving parts.
", forcing Unix to emulate hardware configurations that no one has used for two decades."
See! I told you Wayland supporters were rude. You are calling me 'Nobody'! Go look at other forums discussing this topic. Apparently this 'nobody' is not alone!
You aren't even addressing the fact that I already said I don't really care about X11. I care about remote functionality. Providing network support at a layer between the toolkits and what Wayland provides would be fine by me so long as it meant that this layer was what the toolkits or applications are coded to talk to, not Wayland directly. That way ALL applications could still be remoted. And.. if that layer used similar methods to what X11 used to provide remote access or something entirely different or even used multiple methods, chosen by the application to best suite the kind of content being displayed... that's all ok by me!
"I don't know you tell me. Wayland is a different but better method of getting display data from one place to the other and yet you object to changing it. So why?"
Because.. as it seems to be proposed Wayland is NOT a way to get ALL display data from one place to another. That is outside of Wayland's scope. With remote support moved to the toolkit or application level we only get remote support where someone chose to support that feature. The old system meant EVERYTHING could be displayed remotely. I only want the baby saved, you can pitch the bathwater.
>>>>"To do both of what? Display both kinds of applications remotely?"
>>"Have a display system that both shares and doesn't share buffers. And as far as remoting to properly the same remoting strategy. One is designed for strategies the other doesn't support and vise versa."
Ok, I know the word buffer to mean an area of memory. Basically a big array containing pixel data. Why do I care if remote support is implemented in one big array or a dozen? Hey.. either way.. knock yourself out. Do whichever works better.
Do you mean something different when you say this? Are you saying that we can't have both full desktop remote access and also be able to remote single applications? I do this in Windows with RDP every day at work! On one monitor I display a terminal server desktop to run Visual Studio. i display the full desktop because Visual Studio spins off lots of child windows and that doesn't work as well if I just display Visual Studio remotely. At the same time I am displaying Navicat, running on that same terminal server but by itself, outside of the desktop. it shows up in my local taskbar... it's ju
Is remote display unimportant because there are more people who only run locally? Remote display is somewhat of a fringe thing. But.. so is all Desktop Linux. We are here BECAUSE we are on the fringe. If we weren't we would be on Windows or OSX! Desktop Linux is painful. People are always sending documents, videos, etc.. that require special effort to install proprietary codecs or run semi-functional applications in Wine. If you are sticking to Linux on the desktop then there is probably already some fringe feature you love or rely on or you wouldn't be here. What happens if one day it goes away? If any fringe users of Linux are going to be written off as not significant then you might as well pack it up because we are all fringe users in one way or another.
A local Gnome? A local KDE? My main purpose for running remotely is to NOT have to install and maintain all that baggage in multiple locations. At that point one might as well just set up a NAS to hold their home directories and install the full set of software on every computer. But.. then.. might as well just run Windows. That's how just about every Windows shop office is set up. At that point how does Linux provide something unique?
"It isn't possible to do both."
To do both of what? Display both kinds of applications remotely? Or use two different underlying implementations? It can't all go through one buffer AND go through separate buffers. Ok. Maybe I should say this.. I don't really care about X11 the protocol vs Wayland vs the display protocol of that Mac compatible OS the aliens used in Independence Day. I'm not arguing for or against keeping the underlying architecture behind remote or local display unchanged. X11 serves me well although I am quite aware it is not perfect. If a different method of getting the display data from one place to another works better then why would I be against changing it?
Wayland supporters often say that X11 network transparency or remote display or whatever is already broken. OK. My limited understanding is that as originally intended an application told X to draw a shape or add text, etc.. what got passed over TCP/IP was the command to do so, not a raster graphic of the shape. What I gather from the various pro Wayland posts is that under the hood various hacks have mostly replaced this and now everything is getting drawn at some higher level and passed as bitmap. Ok. But when I go to use an application remotely IT STILL DISPLAYS. In fact, now I have VirtualGL installed so I suppose that has things rendering entirely outside of X and just streaming through as bitmap. But.. it is working! Actually, I love the idea of doing 3d applications this way. Let me build up ONE client that has ONE big honking video card and play video games on it but displayed elsewhere without making me invest in a house full of GPUs.
But that isn't what I came to talk about. It's the interface that I am interested in. I just want to be able to tell the current session that my display is over here. And it all displays. If I feel like doing this with a single application at a time.. I want that to work. If I want to remote display my desktop environment.. then that should work too. If I open a desktop environment remotely.. then when i open something within that environment it should display there. X forced this. When you linked against X-libs it didn't matter if you were actually linking against GTK or QT or ____ which in turn linked against X libs or even if you coded directly to X libs. Implementing remote display at a lower level meant everything had it.
So.. different methods of remote display are needed for different applications. So what? I don't see how that still can't be implemented at a lower (and thus common) level. just give it a default implementation that may not be the most efficient but at least works. If the application or toolkit programmers don't care about remote access then it falls into that by default. Big deal.. at least for LAN users it probably doesn't matter anyway. If s
"Well yes it does result in a fractured feature. They Wayland people see the fracturing as a plus."
So does this mean that I wouldn't be able to say remotely display a desktop environment which uses QT and within that click a shortcut to a GTK app and expect it to open and be managed by that QT desktop environment.
That is the functionality we have now. Once you have your desktop environment displaying remotely everything you do looks and feels local. How can you have that when each app may have a different remote implementation?
>> Talking about Wayland not having remoting implying that Wayland applications won't remote isn't fair not accurate.
Yes it is. In my previous statement I chose QT and GTK as examples because they are so common. A user could have any number of applications using any number of GUI toolkits. Assuming they will all bother to implement their own remote access would way over-optimistic.
>> a) Supporters of network transparency don't know what network transparency is
There are many levels to look at things. You can look at electrons traveling through silicon or the behaviors of transistors combining to form logic gates. Skipping a lot of levels, further up you get all these software buffers, etc.. that Wayland supporters like to talk about. Some levels up from that there is an end user who sets their DISPLAY variable or runs "xorg -query ", etc.. and gets remote access to their desktop. Wayland supporters keep talking about those buffers and other low level things and saying that what goes on at that level isn't really network transparency. Ok. But the user doesn't care! I know I don't!
" You have to make choices. Deciding to help you is deciding to harm others. People who want better games (and BTW I don't game) are making the same argument you are in reverse."
If I can watch a high definition video feed in real time over the internet then I should be able to remotely display a desktop or a user should be able to remotely display a game. The two should not be mutually exclusive. Surely it is possible to fix this in a way that pleases the gamer without screwing it up for the remote desktop user.
You probably are thinking I just proved your point but I did not. I said we should be able to remotely display our DESKTOPS. Not just individual programs. I should be able to see my favorite desktop manager and click shortcuts within it without worrying about which toolkit each uses. It should just work.. just like it does now.
Before you say.. VNC... nope. That is not the same. I use both remote X and VNC. My remote X server is configured to automatically connect when I turn it on. (It just runs xorg -query ) The very first thing I see is a login screen where I can log in as any user of the client computer. If I happen to have changed out the monitor.. well.. auto detection will have already adjusted my resolution accordingly.
I have three VNC sessions running in the background at all times. Two run under my login. One is just the perfect dimensions for my Lapdock. The other is the perfect dimensions for my iPad and happens to be usable though not great on my monitor at work. The third session runs as my daughter's user for her to log in. Most of the time all 3 are unused and yet all 3 are running because otherwise I would have to ssh in first and start them before I could use them.
" but there are many capable developers who deal with that kind of specialty "
Capable of developing a display server? Really? Why?
Until recently pretty much every *nix used X. Of course Windows and Mac also exist, clearly somebody develops those. There are a few outliers like Syllable & ReactOS. All in all I would think that the number of display servers or non-server systems serving that purpose could be counted on one's fingers.
If that's true... why would there be a bunch of available developers with the knowledge to do such things. What are they already working on and why?
"They do agree remote usage is an important feature and it is something they intend to add."
"They do agree it is something on their todo list."
Are you privy to something that I am not? According to the FAQ it is out of scope. I've watched the videos... all I see are statements that it is someone else's problem and that X doesn't do remote anymore anyway.* Wayland developers and supporters have even suggested that networking support be moved to the GUI toolkits. Surely that would result in a fractured feature that works differently on some applications than others and probably not at all on some.
Also... on the To Do list? Wayland is already being pushed in production. This should not happen with basic features still on the "To Do" list. I'm not sure if there are any desktop distros defaulting to it but there is Tizen. I for one have been looking forward to being able to remote display applications from my desktop on my phone or vice versa ever since I used my old Sharp Zaurus! Do you think it's too impractical on the small screen? I often worked this way on the Z'. I even occasionally did real work with SSH on a 3x2" screen with T9 keyboard Nokia Series 60 phone back in the day.
"A respectful comment from the anti-Wayland side! Well done."
I do not believe that there has been much respect coming from the pro-Wayland side. The attitude from the developers seems to be.. you are a minority.. you don't matter. The stuff you care about doesn't work now anyway (even though you are currently using it without problem) Non-developer Wayland supporters are even worse, accusing people who are concerned about remote display of being Neck Beards that are holding them back from getting 3d video acceleration. If the anti-Wayland side seems disrespectful perhaps it should be viewed as a natural response by a community under attack.
* - As Xorg developers I'm sure they know what they are talking about regarding X not doing remote anymore... on a developer level. So it's not really using the X protocol as originally intended when I display something remotely or something like that. As a user I really don't care. I just know that my application is displaying remotely. In other words... it just works.
"Remember that applications, especially those that are often used remotely, are likely to be somewhat delayed in how long before they switch to Wayland only versions."
To me it's not the ability to remote those applications that makes X great. It's the ability to remote the ones that most people would never even think of remoting.
Today the cloud is all the rage. The market is demanding it not just the 'geeks'. For an application that truly begs remoting I think the question isn't does the operating system support remoting it's "why doesn't the application have a built in web interface?!"/ (to the lay user X or Wayland is a part of the OS)
To me the fact that X allows me to display applications that the author never wanted me to display remotely is awesome. It's part of a broader environment of "I get to decide" what features are useful to me, not an application author, not the market or anyone else. This is generally the way Linux has worked until recently. For a system that makes these decisions for you, where the things a typical user would want just work a Windows or Macintosh desktop would be just fine. That need is already filled!
That is not to imply that it is only important to me on a basis of ideology. I happen to use a remote X terminal myself. i use it as though it were just another face of my main PC, not as a way to run specific, specially remote-worthy applications. It's a way that I can have one and only one highly customized desktop to babysit and yet have it in multiple places.
Which addresses exactly none of the deficiencies I brought up regarding VNC as a replacement for X.
Keep in mind this is pretty low level stuff. We aren't talking about coding yet another mp3 player (which is just a frontend for lame). We are talking about hardware drivers, video backend stuff, network protocols... I am a 'developer' myself but I would have absolutely no idea where to even begin working on something like this. Just listening to the Wayland developers talk about the internals of X vs Wayland and why Wayland is better gets me lost after a paragraph or two at most.
The population out there that is capable of working on a problem like this is probably much smaller than the population that might contribute to other aspects of open source software. Of those few that are qualified apparently none use this feature even though many of the rest of us depend on it.
Sure you can run X apps on Wayland.. For now...
Then distros will suddenly standardize on Wayland. Soon after X versions of applications will not be available. Then.. bye bye remote display. Were you still using that? If so then you are just a neck beard who is afraid of change and was holding up progress so that some poor kid's video game ran a couple of FPS slower. Your features don't matter but the gamer's needs do matter. I guess that makes sense seeing that video games are the only life many of those sorry slobs will ever experience anyway...
That just leaves them more air to spew about their gender conflict.
As an actual user, not just a developer talking about protocols try actually setting that up and using it. Supposedly that code is in the main branch but there is ZERO documentation about how to make it work. From what I have heard one of the developers wrote it in order to try to shut up all the people who were rightly complaining that a major feature from X was being taken away. Once he had a single demo it then went by the wayside. Does that code even work any more? Who knows, how would one even find out?
As far as I can tell remote Wayland was developed only far enough to be a publicity stunt and doesn't really exist in a usable state.
"If you need anything X of the above, or want to keep using xfwm, wayland already has a X-window server, so you can keep using it."
Which will mean squat if applications eventually stop supporting X.
"X network layer is super inefficient sending frames"....
so. It's always better than nothing and actually not bad over a LAN. As a developer you may be able to pick apart a million things it is doing wrong but as a user all I see is something that works verses something that doesn't even offer the same functionality.
"VNC is much better for anything else."
VNC, at least in any implementation that is available for a user to download is a solution to an entirely different problem. If you want to occasionally access an entire desktop remotely inside a window from another computer then sure, VNC is great. I just wish someone would implement sound support and built-in encryption so I wouldn't have to bother with SSH tunnels.
Where is VNC's solution for bringing displaying a single application remotely so that it seems to be running locally? Where is VNC's solution to creating a permanent remote terminal complete with login window?
VNC vs X is apples vs oranges.
It removed pesky features (such as remote display). Features like that ruin the simple appearance of pre-internet technology that is all the rage today.
-- ok, I have heard that one of the Wayland developers did some sort of remote display testing but as far as I can tell you have to pull his personal git fork, build it yourself and you get no documentation if you want to try to use it.
Brasero doesn't even find the burner until you install a bunch of Gnome stuff. Sure, you can still chose a different window or desktop manager and run Brasero but you still have to install a huge chunk of Gnome before it works!
In a pouch that clips to my belt. Not very stylish, I know but hey.. I'm already married, not trying to impress the girls. I can wear a shirt that hangs down and covers it 1/2 the year anyway.
My front pockets are for my wallet on one side, keys on the other. Nothing goes in the back ones for me to sit on unless it's thin like a piece of paper! I also keep my leatherman in with the phone giving me two reasons to keep wearing that.
A lot of my stuff IS that old. So long as you aren't using it for gaming hardware from back then was still pretty fast. Well.. 90% or more of what I do can be done with a web browser and a text editor so... what more do I need?
I still burn optical discs of Youtube videos to play in our DVD player for my daughter. Also, at least half of the computers I have to deal with, although their BIOSs have a boot from USB option it never works. A bootable CD... that always does the trick.
Umm...dedicated burner programs (in Linux) is exactly what I was talking about when you responded that Windows can do this. So... I explained why it does not.
It's a good thing there are still people like you out there. If people couldn't keep their phones in their pockets think of all those mall-kiosk workers who repair cracked screens that would be out of a job! They would have nothing to do besides aimlessly wander up and down the isles... it would be Mallrats I tell you, Mallrats!
Seriously, keeping a smartphone in a pocket is stupid.
Sure, for a basic data disc. It's not much harder with good ol' Xcdroast.
What does Windows explorer do if you drag music files onto it. Do you get an audio CD? (honestly I'm asking cause I don't know) If so, what formats, does it handle ogg?
Now lets see you drag a bunch of video files into explorer(it's family stuff you recorded with your cellphone right? surely i'm not talking about piracy here) Do you get something that you can pop into your DVD player and have a reasonable expectation that it will actually play?
Mixed mode discs? Finalized or un-finalized RWs?
My point is that there is a lot more to a decent burner program than just dragging some files onto a disc.