Is there any plan by Wayland to incorporate ssh forwarding? Last I heard it wasn't in the cards, and I think that feature is useful enough; it's probably the only feature I really would miss.
X11 is capable of drawing primitives. Even though the most popular toolkits (Gtk, QT) sadly did not use them, those who did (e.g. Athena, Tcl/Tk) worked perfectly over the network, even modem lines.
If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections.
Because that's more efficient.
If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections.
Nope, drawing commands for a modern UI are more bytes than the window contents. This is a deeply counterintuitive topic and it's unfortunate that nobody implemented waypipe until recently so it was impossible to measure.
Also including drawing into your Compositor (like Windows and MacOS do) gives you additional infinite scaling for free which would solve the multi dpi monitor problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics)
>The name Cairo derives from the original name Xr, interpreted as the Greek letters chi and rho.
You're right, it doesn't actually make sense to put your drawing functions in the display server any more (at least in the case of X11, which doesn't have an extension language to drive the drawing functions -- but it did make sense for NeWS which also used PostScript as an extension language as well as a drawing API).
So Cairo rose above X11 and became its own independent library, so it could be useful to clients and toolkits on any window system or hardware.
https://www.osnews.com/story/3602/xr-x11-cross-device-render...
https://web.archive.org/web/20030805030147/http://xr.xwin.or...
https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004...
Here's some email discussion with Jim Gettys about where Cairo came from:
From: Jim Gettys <jg@laptop.org> Date: Jan 9, 2007, 11:04 PM
The day I thought X was dead was the day I installed CDE on my Alpha.
It was years later I realized the young turks were ignoring the disaster perpetrated by the UNIX vendors in the name of "standardization"; since then, Keith Packard and I have tried to pay for our design mistakes in X by things like the new font model, X Render extension, Composite, and Cairo, while putting stakes in the heart of disasters like XIE, LBX, PEX, the old X core font model, and similar design by committee mistakes (though the broken core 2D graphics and font stuff must be considered "original sin" committed by people who didn't know any better at the time).
So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again.
From: Don Hopkins <dhopkins@donhopkins.com> Date: Wed, Jan 17, 2007, 10:50 PM
Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun.
A lot of that old X11 stuff was thrown in by big companies to shill existing products (like using PEX to sell 3d graphics hardware, by drawing rotating 3-d cubes in an attempt to hypnotize people).
Remember UIL? I heard that was written by the VMS trolls at DEC, who naturally designed it with an 132 column line length limitation and no pre-processor of course. The word on the street was that DEC threw down the gauntlet and insisted on UIL being included in the standard, even though the rest of the committee hated it for sucking so bad. But DEC threatened to hold their breath until they got their way.
And there were a lot of weird dynamics around commercial extensions like Display PostScript, which (as I remember it) was used as an excuse for not fixing the font problems a lot earlier: "If you want to do readable text, then you should be using Display PostScript."
The problem was that Linux doesn't have a vendor to pay the Display PostScript licensing fee to Adobe, so Linux drove a lot of "urban renewal" of problems that had been sidelined by the big blundering companies originally involved with X.
>So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again.
Hey, that's a lot better than dynamiting the whale, which seemed like a such good idea at the time! (Oh the humanity!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk
From: Jim Gettys <jg@laptop.org> Date: Jan 17, 2007, 11:41 PM
> Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun.
Yup. Cairo is really good stuff. This time we had the benefit of Lyle Ramshaw to get us unstuck. Would that I'd known Lyle in 1986; but it was too late 3 years later when I got to know him.
Every time I've tried it, it was plagued with problems (fonts, HiDPI issues, different environments) and horrible performance. I mostly had to resort back to NX, which is okish, but not better at all than Windows' RDP or better VNC solutions. So what's the big draw here?
Your mileage may vary by use case and bandwidth, especially over the public internet. But if someone has a similar use case to mine in 2019, it's still probably usable.
Even wireshark is usable this way.
I do a lot of these things with Linux, you cannot do in Windows:
- Log in, start an arbitrary program. Then log out, without the program stopping
- Start a GUI application as a different user than the one logged in graphically
- Start a GUI application that resides inside a container
- Start a GUI application in the local LAN over ssh
I do this all the time to confine an application to a network namespace.
It is great for forcing some GUI applications (for example a browser) through VPN while keeping everything else going over the default route.
This way you can make sure the browser in your network namespace can only use the VPN.
Start a GUI application as a different user than the one logged in graphically
I don't think X-forwarding is a good substitute for VNC(-alikes) if you need to do long sessions, but for occasional one-off GUI work where either there's no CLI equivalent, or the CLI version isn't the best choice, it does get the job done.
It was also useful when I wanted to output some pixel graphics from Erlang to my Windows desktop from a program running on unixy devices. x server windows, x client on linux, freebsd, os x -- occasionally also ran with os x as x server and linux or freebsd as x client.
The key thing for me is the ability to export the gui for a single application on one system to a desktop environment on another --- I think this is possible with other systems, but it's not easily exposed. Performance and fidelity of the experience is usually not that important for me, as long as it's usable.
The main draw is just that it works so seamlessly. All you have to do is remember to add the "-X" flag when you call ssh and everything just works.
It works great. And Mozilla/Firefox has been working wonders with it (when you open a web link on a remote application, it opens the URL in the local, already opened Firefox and has been doing so since Netscape times).
NX allowed me to work on my Linux desktop in Iceland from a hotel room in China.