I as a user haven't seen any reason to care about Wayland. And losing/dropping X11's network transparency seems rather surprising in a heavily networked world...
There is significant overlap between former X11 developers and Wayland developers. They didn't drop it because they are incompetent which seems to be what your are implying. The people that decided to drop it are probably the people that know X11 the best.
It started working poorly when X clients started rendering everything locally in the client and simply pushing pixels to the display server.
Which means it works poorly for modern apps. Modern apps use the GPU for client-side rendering.
And it absolutely worked poorly even in the 90s. It was virtually impossible to run X apps over anything but a fast local LAN. That's what "Broadway"/LBX was about. It was kind of a failure.
RDP has been a better networked display protocol than X for a couple decades now. Let's not fool ourselves that X isn't obsolete on every axis.
I'm not sure who you're replying to here, because it certainly isn't me.
Well in my experience, running X11 applications using network transparency works perfectly fine. It can be a life saver when your server is a proprietary UNIX, these are still in many Fortune 500 companies.
I have/still use network transparency as: Linux/BSDs <-> BSDs/Linux and Linux <-> AIX.
I even ran a few (Xlib/Motif) applications as "Linux <-> Linux <-> AIX" where the middle Linux was a pass through server without any issues.
So, No issues with network transparency, that is why I will avoid Wayland as long as I can.
To the article, Wayland on OpenBSD looks like a very extremely project, wish you luck.
It might be useful to be able to run Wayland applications remotely.
But this will be a useful stopgap for those who stubbornly cling to X11 (or are forced to, e.g. by NVIDIA hardware) as more and more useful software drops X support and goes Wayland-only.
I can't think of any such case, any example?
Besides even if X support is dropped by an application, 12to11 - or any other Wayland implementation that runs under X - will keep it working. It isn't like most programs use X directly anyway.
GTK5 might be more of an issue but so far programs barely use GTK4, let alone 5. I'm not sure GNOME applications are used much outside of GNOME. In either case i'd expect something 12to11 to work with those by then (if it doesn't already).
And TBH i'd expect there will be X compatible programs for a very long time to come.
X has to do that with DRI and client side rendering too, doesn't it?
> As long as Wayland doesn't deliver a remote rendering protocol, the best path forward seems to be shipping Javascript apps to a browser on the end user's machine (where his GPU will be available).
Why does that seem like the best path forward? Seems crazy. For incidental things, admin, etc., software rendering would be fine. The right path forward for a high performance application that needs to ship data to a client that can render it would be to transfer that data, not the drawing of it.
1. Well I assert that it was not an architectural mistake. So that doesn't really move the conversation. 2. Whether or not it was a mistake, does not change how things are. So you can't really use that as a point against Wayland for X.
> and Wayland wants to cement that. That’s why we see so many webapps where we would have expected remote windows driven by a backend server; Javascript became the GPU-local end of a lot of opaque rendering protocols to fill the gap.
Client side has been driven overwhelmingly by Windows in the past decades though, so I don't see how that is the reason. The number of javascript apps caused by DRI in X must be approximately zero, and caused by Wayland exactly zero.
I imagine a man surrounded by the X11 books (which is how O'Reilly got it's start) strewn around a messy desk, 2 large monitors and a small desktop system beside them. On the floor, a Sun Enterprise E450 in its deskside enclosure.
In my experience, when combined with SSH compression (ssh -XC) it works well enough that even running Firefox over Internet is usable (although with noticeable latency). Without compression, it is unusable (for Firefox) even on gigabit LAN.
Back when X11 was gaining traction the LAN was 10mbps and WAN was 1.5mbps.
Now people have true 1Gbit connections to the WAN and can easily have 10gbit or much more on the LAN...
The last time I had it working well was in 2005 using a full desktop session across a local network. The bit about only getting the one application across has always been a bit wonky. That's not to say that you can't do it, but it's not really a daily driver sort of thing.
And no, I don't think the developers are incompetent, they obviously have different priorities than I do. Being able to shift an entire desktop environment over a network is something I've done since I started using the internet in various ways and I'll echo the sentiment that it seems incredibly useless to remove this feature in today's world.
To be quite honest I'm tired of this holier-than-though attitude. They dropped it because they are lazy or just don't want to support it and they should just be honest about that. They certainly didn't do it because it makes my life easier and I wish they would stop telling me I'm in the wrong.
You still have ssh -X functionality just fine without any network transparency required, e.g. waypipe or rdp (e.g. builtin on gnome) or vnc, .... Of course that is not going away.
So very few new things that require remote operation in the past 20 years should have baked in the requirement for a networked GUI.
I don't know the incentives are there for a conspiracy in this case.
RDP works great in LAN (win-win win-linux) and ok over DSL.
Plain ssh/X11 over DSL is a disaster but may be passable on a LAN.
RDP is the better protocol here and pipewire mimics it (I think) which is the correct thing to do. X11 was designed for throughput and not latency and that kills any desktop interactivity.
As somebody that my job depends on it I don't worry too much about the future of display networking. I think we would be ok at the end.