Fedora To Eventually Move to Wayland Too | Hacker News Reader

Fedora To Eventually Move to Wayland Too

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75 pointsshubhkarman8 comments

From the article: "efficient remoting protocols do not look like X"

I'll attest to that. Back in 1999/2000 when I had to administer a 500-700 element network using HPopenView over a 128 Kbit ISDN link, the performance was "OK", but nothing to write home about. If I had a lot of work to do, I was often tempted to just head into the office, and work there.

Then, Windows XP+Remote Desktop came in vogue, and the combination of Windows XP running the HummingBird Client (Exceed was the common X-Server at the time), accessed via RDP over ISDN, was actually a very successful combination.

Net-Net - While everyone talks about how great X-Windows is from a network-transparency perspective, I've always had more success with RDP - to the point of running it on my iPhone/iPad to manage my desktop at work. I'm not even sure if they make an X-Server for the iPhone. (Edit: of course they do - http://www.appstorehq.com/ix11-xserver-iphone-32068/app)

And VNC is just plain great as well - lots of competition in that ecosystem, and is hands down the most elegant solution to manage a couple dozen desktops running in VMware workstation for Windows.

So - Given that X-Windows has always been a bit "kludgy" for Desktop Apps (And I speak as one who has been using them for well over 10 years, sometimes on a daily basis for years at a stretch), and has never really been that super as a remote-access mechanism, has likely held back the adoption of Linux as a Desktop OS, AND will also likely be still supported even as Wayland starts to come on board - I say this is a GREAT announcement, and look forward to the community coming onboard and developing the Wayland ecosystem.

If you want remote access, NX is much better than pure X (nomachine has some great tools), and is on par (if not better) than RDP (in my opinion, anyway). I prefer straight SSH, but this is obviously not the same use case as yours.

Finally, something good comes out of the CADT model. With a bit of luck, we'd get rid of the X Windows System in our own lifetime!

Careful what you wish for there. If Wayland truly follows CADT it will be scrapped before it's finished.

> NVIDIA may not have any plans to support it right now, but I'm pretty sure they eventually won't have much of a choice.

Yes, because the large market share of Desktop Linux is influential enough to get NVIDIA to bend to its will.

There must be some reason why Nvidia released Linux drivers and if Wayland aligns with that reason, Nvidia will adapt.

Yes but I still find it kinda dumb that Nvidia is not involved in the decision making about the future of the Linux desktop, since they were the only ones which provided working drivers in the last years for Linux.

Both Intel and AMD/ATI have provided Linux drivers for quite some time now. Where Nvidis does have pioneering status is in providing solaris and freebsd drivers.

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