Comment by erglkjahlkh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erglkjahlkh | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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).

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

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