Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#11

Post by petepete » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

altmind wrote: post #3

mindcrime wrote: post #2

Meh. As far as I'm concerned, Wayland is strictly inferior to X, so long as it fails to support network transparency / remoting. Talk to me when they have a real solution for this, besides VNC or supporting RDP.

Xorg remoting was poorly designed to accomodate DRI/DRM, video card acceleration and had adequate performance to only display primitives on screen. Thats the reasons of poor Xorg remoting adoption. I dont remember seeing anyone in this decade using it - it hands down lost to vnc/nx and rdp.

I've not seen anyone using VNC or remote Xorg for years. Is it really that important these days?

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#12

Post by sp332 » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #2

Meh. As far as I'm concerned, Wayland is strictly inferior to X, so long as it fails to support network transparency / remoting. Talk to me when they have a real solution for this, besides VNC or supporting RDP.

Remoting will be up to the compositor implementation, it's not specified in the Wayland protocol. For example, Weston has just added a "remoting" plugin last month. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Weston-6... This also allows for some really crazy ideas like a Wayland compositor running in a browser for remote app access. https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#13

Post by pantalaimon » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

I think the author is confusing something here

> The reference implementation of the protocol (Weston and it's associated libraries) is written in C. That means you could wrap the C code with Rust, which several people have done already [1] However, I get the impression that the results are not very 'rustic', meaning it's like you are coding C from Rust, instead of writing real Rust code.

> To address the problems of dealing with the existing native Wayland implementations, a couple of the Rust Wayland developers have joined together to build a new Wayland implementation in pure Rust called wlroots [2]

[1] https://github.com/Smithay/wayland-rs [2] https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots

wlroots is written in C whereas wayland-rs - a Rust implementation of the wayland protocol (client and server) is written in - Rust.

I'm not familiar with either project, but this just stood out immediately when looking at the Github pages.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#14

Post by miloignis » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

Do note that the article is mainly about Wayland on the raspberry pi. Of course Wayland isn't the default most places yet (Fedora being the big exception, I think), though you can install it on most distros.

I've been Wayland/Sway on NixOS for a while, and I really like it.

One question though - the article seems to say that wlroots is a Rust project, but it seems to very much be a pure C project? (https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots)

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#15

Post by hs86 » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

After reading http://techtrickery.com/keyloggers.html I am not sure if I ever want to have Xorg installed anymore. Wayland is great but it seems like having a fully featured *nix desktop without XWayland installed is still hard to achieve.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#16

Post by josteink » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

altmind wrote: post #8

jolmg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how you define better. VNC may be faster, but it's just because X carries a lot of historical cruft, I believe. Usability-wise, X is more flexible. I can move individual windows between computers in X. I can't do that with VNC. I wouldn't mind doing the jump to Wayland if it were as flexible as X, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Correct me if I'm wrong.

what's the point of running program locally, to be rendered locally, sending the primitives to Xorg server to be displayed somewhere else? is it using Xorg as a network proxy?

I think you got it kinda backwards, but due to confusing naming you wouldn’t be the first.

It’s more like I’m logging into a remote server (using stuff like SSH), starting applications there and getting the GUI up on my local desktop, like any other local window/app, due to X-forwarding (back to my Xorg server).

It’s not perfect, but it sure is a lot more “natural” and integrated into your desktop than VNC or RDP.

I hope we can keep something similar with Wayland (using maybe XWayland or other compatibility kludges). I think it’s pretty nice.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#17

Post by miloignis » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

hs86 wrote: post #15

After reading http://techtrickery.com/keyloggers.html I am not sure if I ever want to have Xorg installed anymore. Wayland is great but it seems like having a fully featured *nix desktop without XWayland installed is still hard to achieve.

It's definitely possible depending on your use case - I can run Firefox and a terminal without XWayland running, which is all I need. (There was a weird bug where Firefox under Wayland would open an X window first and then discard it, not sure if that's been fixed yet)

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#18

Post by exelius » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

munchbunny wrote: post #7

mindcrime wrote: post #2

Meh. As far as I'm concerned, Wayland is strictly inferior to X, so long as it fails to support network transparency / remoting. Talk to me when they have a real solution for this, besides VNC or supporting RDP.

After this many years, I think the ambition to support remoting at the per-window level just isn't important. In practice I've actually found it outright confusing when I have two windows operating inside two separate environments, but they're both in the same visual container. VNC/RDP work well enough, and SSH works well enough for when you don't need a GUI.

I tend to agree. The original promise of remote X11 (server side compute and thin clients) is provided via web apps these days.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#19

Post by impostir » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

I recently switched back to Arch and decided to try out Wayland. So far, I have only had some problems with Firefox, which could be solved I'm just being lazy. My one wider complaint is no autokey support, which isn't planned on being added. Overall, solid replacement to X11

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#20

Post by vetinari » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

munchbunny wrote: post #7

mindcrime wrote: post #2

Meh. As far as I'm concerned, Wayland is strictly inferior to X, so long as it fails to support network transparency / remoting. Talk to me when they have a real solution for this, besides VNC or supporting RDP.

After this many years, I think the ambition to support remoting at the per-window level just isn't important. In practice I've actually found it outright confusing when I have two windows operating inside two separate environments, but they're both in the same visual container. VNC/RDP work well enough, and SSH works well enough for when you don't need a GUI.

Both RDP and Citrix do support publishing just the application, without desktop. It is actually pretty neat to have application, running somewhere in the server room, to be mixed with my local applications.

Going even further, the remote applications can run each on different machine in the Citrix cluster, so it is possible to load balance on per-app basis.