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Wprs – rootless remote desktop for Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications

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Re: Wprs – rootless remote desktop for Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications

#21

Post by znpy »

billpg wrote: post #18

"We've built X. It allows you to run graphical applications over a network." "Here's an optimization for when the X display is the same machine as the process." "We've built Wayland. We all run applications on the same machine as the display and X gets in the way." "We'd like to run applications from machines over the internet." "We've built Wprs. It allows you to run graphical applications over a network." That's th…

It’s not a circle, it’s plain stupidity. Running stuff over the network has always been a requirement and somehow wayland people decided so ignore that requirement, producing an half-assed spec and quarter-assed implementations.

All this could have been avoided, and yet here we are…

Re: Wprs – rootless remote desktop for Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications

#22

Post by delusional »

billpg wrote: post #18

"We've built X. It allows you to run graphical applications over a network." "Here's an optimization for when the X display is the same machine as the process." "We've built Wayland. We all run applications on the same machine as the display and X gets in the way." "We'd like to run applications from machines over the internet." "We've built Wprs. It allows you to run graphical applications over a network." That's th…

The X protocol is from a time before proprietary/differentiated GPU devices. Network transparency looks very different when you're doing simple stuff like "render a line" or "render a box". Nowadays even 2D applications are essentially sending arbitrary programs to a standalone accelerator (the GPU) which they expect to have incredible bandwidth.

In the simple case of the past, it made sense to send the primitives. In the complex now it's way more robust to stuff the bitmap over the wire.

Re: Wprs – rootless remote desktop for Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications

#23

Post by IceWreck »

npteljes wrote: post #20

What I never understood is how Spice is not elevated to a separate product. It does a fantastic job handling the graphical, audio, and peripheral connections to VMs, so how come there isn't a Spice server that I can just install to whatever Linux system and remote to it with the Spice clients that are already there? Also, I'd like to plug Sunshine - I think it works on Wayland, and from the tests I did it does a fant…

I love Spice too but it has been deprecated for a while now. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

Re: Wprs – rootless remote desktop for Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications

#24

Post by npteljes »

IceWreck wrote: post #23
npteljes wrote: post #20

What I never understood is how Spice is not elevated to a separate product. It does a fantastic job handling the graphical, audio, and peripheral connections to VMs, so how come there isn't a Spice server that I can just install to whatever Linux system and remote to it with the Spice clients that are already there? Also, I'd like to plug Sunshine - I think it works on Wayland, and from the tests I did it does a fant…

I love Spice too but it has been deprecated for a while now. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

Oh no. Thanks for passing the news along.

EDIT: just an FYI for everyone interested, here's a bit of info about how Proxmox is handling it. TL;DR Spice is still at least maintained until 2029, so it's not going to just go away anytime soon.

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/plans-for-spice.113339/

Re: Wprs – rootless remote desktop for Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications

#26

Post by aragilar »

kaba0 wrote: post #19
billpg wrote: post #18

"We've built X. It allows you to run graphical applications over a network." "Here's an optimization for when the X display is the same machine as the process." "We've built Wayland. We all run applications on the same machine as the display and X gets in the way." "We'd like to run applications from machines over the internet." "We've built Wprs. It allows you to run graphical applications over a network." That's th…

X being network transparent hasn’t been true for decades — no one uses xmotif and similar GUI libs, they just grab a buffer and paint stuff themselves, making the X protocol an inefficient format to carry bitmaps around. Local-first is the correct approach as the end computers are significantly more powerful than 30 years ago. Plus, we can transport bitmaps far more efficiently with compression, so it’s quite obvious…

I'm not sure this is true for apps that commonly forwarded though? My impression is tk for example uses xlib heavily and so has much better behaviour over the network than GTK, and the majority of apps I've seen where the audience uses X forwarding commonly seem to be using tk.

Re: Wprs – rootless remote desktop for Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications

#27

Post by doubled112 »

XorNot wrote: post #14
coryrc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the only way is to always run a remote X server (i.e. Xvnc) and always connect to it, even when sitting at the local computer. Maybe you could do something with dpms but that leaves the keyboard active still.

Yeah see this has always been where I think Windows dominates Linux. Going from local to RDP to local feels seamless and secure. I wish we could get that experience on Linux.

Does GNOME's new RDP server get us any closer to this dream?

Re: Wprs – rootless remote desktop for Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications

#29

Post by spqrr »

npteljes wrote: post #20

What I never understood is how Spice is not elevated to a separate product. It does a fantastic job handling the graphical, audio, and peripheral connections to VMs, so how come there isn't a Spice server that I can just install to whatever Linux system and remote to it with the Spice clients that are already there? Also, I'd like to plug Sunshine - I think it works on Wayland, and from the tests I did it does a fant…

https://www.spice-space.org/xspice.html

Gives you an X server that you can connect to with spice. It's bare bones (no audio, etc.), but looks useable.

Re: Wprs – rootless remote desktop for Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications

#30

Post by M95D »

Shish2k wrote: post #28

Is there any open-source remote desktop that forwards the full desktop experience (not just pixels, but also audio, input devices beyond keyboard & mouse, with high refresh rates and low latency)?

Aren't you asking too much? We barely have these on the local machine...
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