Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

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Like you I have removed almost everything "Desk Top Environment" recently and have been enjoying the increased resources I get. I similarly hate that everything is getting intertwined so much that it is hard to actually pick and choose applications without taking a huge amount of cruft with it.

Having said that, if you look at the list of people working on Wayland it is quite impressive. As it contains a good number of core X windows developers, you would be hard pressed to argue that they don't understand the trade-offs that they are introducing. And while I haven't had time to play with it in any real depth, I've looked at Mutter's API and it is quite nice. Finally, I've actually tried Wayland (with Gnome and on top of Mutter by itself) and while there were still some problems at the time (about 3 months ago), I was actually able to get a full day's work done without much complaint. In fact, it is snappy and responsive and it mostly works.

I like exporting my X displays through ssh, so I really don't know if I will use Wayland seriously any time soon, but I think it is a good prospect for people who aren't me. I like the fact that this update from the Gnome guys shows that they are thinking, "Hey maybe not everybody will dump X. Let's try to find a place where we can showcase Wayland with the least inconvenience to conservative people".

IMHO, this kind of development is nothing but good. The real question is if Red Hat will take a less heavy hand in deployment of this as opposed to other "Let's reinvent the world" projects. As an option, I'm extremely happy to have it. If it gets wrapped up in everything so that I can't use any popular software without it, then I will be unhappy. But so far I see no signs of that.

Exporting X via SSH is still ultimately a bad user experience, since it's not portable.

The thing we desperately need is a desktop-session (Mutter-level) VNC server that will operate behind a lockscreen, so you can export a remote desktop locally or remotely and have it persist between logins.

As long as it supports root windowless mode, whatever works is fine for me. Also, it must work out of the box on most common distributions, without requiring extra software installation. Configuration is fine though, not even X11 forwarding is enabled on many platforms by default.

I have sadly seen nothing of value in Wayland that would be worth losing X11 over SSH forwarding. I really need some similar feature, and I am not aware of anything usable being available with Mir or Wayland. VNC doesn't cut it unless it can export single windows.

I am well aware that X11 tunneling is an aged piece of technology that is in serious need of facelift, but the new alternative to X11 should match the functionality. Before that happens, I will keep uninstalling Wayland and Mir, because the critical requirements (for me and my environments) have not been met.

> I am well aware that X11 tunneling is an aged piece of technology that is in serious need of facelift, but the new alternative to X11 should match the functionality

But many of the performance problems of X11 is rooted directly in features most of the user-base no longer uses (X11 as a network protocol being the prime example) and the work on a new protocol is being made specifically by eliminating the tradeoffs introduced by those features.

I welcome a newer, more performant option, but I guess it won't have anything to offer for your concerns.

Converting API calls into network messages is usually still a better option than something like VNC, which just tries to copy across images of the screen. Put VNC side by side with Windows RDP, and RDP's advantage is usually very clear. Unless many heavy assets need to be processed by the API before it can composite the screen, sending API calls ought to be better. Fancy 3D effects etc. in particular should be much smoother.

The bigger issue with X11 is its backwards server / client orientation. That optimizes for a rare scenario, and makes the more common situation - where you want to connect to an existing session with a bunch of running apps, and disconnect from it without blowing everything away - much more awkward to configure.

I believe the main advantage is that wayland enables better access to hardware acceleration, at least once Nvidia and AMD implement support for egl.

Weston already supports RDP (including desktop sharing). I believe newer versions of RDP can support a root windowless mode (so I'm not sure if Weston's RDP currently supports this).

NX pretty much does this, and works much better than VNC or ordinary X forwarding.

NX doesn't get the love it deserves

NoMachine's NX (the original) is a proprietary product in a free-software world. That doesn't really surprise me.

x2go is really nice, and is free software: http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/start

Like GP I am using an older desktop, OpenBox+ROX Filer, basically the same desktop I was using in 1999. Very fast over remote, maximally fast locally. Doubt I'll ever change.

The core NX compression technology was available to everyone up until 3.5.0. This sparked x2go, neatx, freenx and opennx. Are there any more derivatives to add to that list which we should thank NX for?

X forwarding is not really secure anyway if you are using it on an untrusted remote machine.

If you are an admin on a server and someone logs in with X forwarding then you can access his X server easily without any limitation (keylogger, screenshots, etc...).

Not sure i see how that can be fixed in software, if the attacker has control over the hardware (or sit closer to it than the software you are using).

The point being made here is that if I run an xterm on your machine (forwarded to the X server on my machine), then you can now access everything happening in the X server on my machine.

Noted. What puzzles me is that this has not been sorted in all the years, without doing a complete ground up recreation...

Well, back in the mid-90's we had lots of fun with it in the university.

Specially since most students didn't even bothered to configure xauth and xhost properly.

Weston has a VNC server built in. Then if you have a desktop environment which uses Weston you'll be able to use VNC.

What has been added to the spec is being able to run one "compositor" in another. So you can have KDE/Enlightment running within/under Weston. I don't think that is the approach taken by GNOME though.

Not sure if it'll be session specific or not.

> Exporting X via SSH is still ultimately a bad user experience, since it's not portable.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'not portable' you can have X server on Windows..

And 'Wayland' export is even worse as it depends on whether the Wayland compositor support the export or not, AFAIK Weston is the only one which currently have an export display backend. I think that you're suggesting to "stack" compositor to avoid this issue (not a new idea), I hope that this is what will happen eventually..

I believe he meant sessions being portable across devices. You cannot start a X application on your laptop, disconnect, switch to your desktop, continue using the application. (At least, it does not easily work out of the box. Allegedly it is possible in certain scenarios.)

VNC and other on-top approaches can do this (even with Wayland).

At the very least wayland can simply be used as a underlying graphics driver via XWayland, allowing for GPU acceleration of the whole of the X session without having to muck around with questionable WM hacks etc.

Not to sound cliche, but try Gentoo. It takes a bit of getting used to be it's concept of USE Flags are designed exactly because of "everything is getting intertwined so much that it is hard to actually pick and choose applications".

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