WOW, Wayland over Wire (2016) | Hacker News Reader

WOW, Wayland over Wire (2016)

blogs.s-osg.org

50 pointsmindcrime28 comments

In the comments the author says, it's not happening.

"Wayland network transparency will likely be handled at the compositor level, and not in libwayland, so this work never evolved beyond a proof of concept."

As a regular end user, I don't care where this is handled, as long as it is handled.

Network transparency is, to me, the killer feature of X11. I am aware that security on X11 is atrocious at best and that a replacement is needed, but any successor without network transparency is inacceptable to me.

Worse, actually, there are a number of other Unix systems (and even non-Unix systems) around that speak X11. In fact, the killer feature of X11 is cross platform network transparency. Unless other platforms adopt Wayland or a common wire protocol, that is lost, too.

Do you often rely on X11 network transparency ? I love the idea but I rarely see it mentionned (maybe because people are too happy using it). On the other hand many many people talk about VNC like protocols (be it on Windows or other OSes)

I actually do, yes.

All of my machines at home and online are all Linux machines, one of. Some of them have graphical UIs for various reasons. With that, all I need do is include the -X forward in my ssh config, and I can run X apps and display locally.

Right now, I have 3 programs running on remote machines. I don't have to care where they are... because they're right here on my desktop. It just works.

And Wayland/Mir/whatever doesn't. That's trading security problems for a purely worse experience.

Last time I tried Weston it had an rdp backend implemented.

This is about forwarding individual remote applications, not entire desktops.

I think RDP can do that, too. At least on Windows there is something called RemoteApp (or something like that) that does just that. (I have never used it, though!)

This is the skinny on RemoteApp. You need to be running Windows Server 2008 or later as the host machine:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753844(WS.10)....

Citrix have a similar thing called XenApp:

https://www.citrix.com/products/xenapp-xendesktop/

At home, I have several machines running Linux/*BSD, and I regularly display windows on my Desktop (currently a Mac Mini running XQuartz).

VNC is nice, but X11 has the ability to seamlessly display single windows on another machine. VNC does not do that, at least as far as I know.

My working environment is windows+exceed+putty. All my developments are performed on remote linux box. This means that 90% of my X11 usage is via network transparency.

On slow connections, I use vncviewer and x11vnc that I dont bother to launch locally.

I'd use it a lot more if I was confident that once I finally got it to work over SSH, that I didn't just compromise SSH on both computers.

If only they could try a [Mosh - Mobile Shell](https://mosh.org/) type of design for graphics over the wire that would be really cool. !!

A few years ago I tested Xpra, maybe it would suit your needs, it's "screen for x11" : http://xpra.org/

I think QUIC would be simple to integrate and you'd get most of the benefits of mosh (roaming, intermittent connectivity) without having to change the architecture to do state synchronization like mosh uses.

all we need is a webassembler client for wayland and byebye html.

Check out [1], it's kind of related. Although I suppose that the ease of building html+css+js apps could hardly be superseded by any desktop framework..

[1] https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html

HTML killer? :) Not sure if there are enough combinations in the unix timestamp left for it to happen.

Finally, perfection is within our reach.

For perfection, I'm waiting for webasm implementation of CLIM.

Reminds me that I've not seen a CLOS.js yet while there's about everything else being ported to it.

With ClojureScript you are half way there.

Clojure is quite a different mindset from CL[OS]. Not that I dislike the pragmatic integrism of clojure regarding immutability and idioms. The exception system, the included MOP, the debugging system. You may say that one can add it on top of clojure ..

Object System, I like this term. this is something i'm interested in having when web assembler is mainstream.

I actual want to make something similar, with an indentation free scripting language.

The WOW starts now

Nice ungooglealbe name, it horribly conflicts with World Of Warcraft and Windows On Windows(the syswow64 subsistem of windows)

Well, sometimes this is exactly what you want - try to find a pirate copy of the movie xXx :)

I tried searching for "xxx movie torrent", first result was porn, the next four results were pirate copies of that movie. Surprisingly, it was not hard at all.

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