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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

#61

Post by Qwertious »

IshKebab wrote: post #42
epcoa wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two seemingly irreconcilable camps at this point as to whether X itself is fundamentally sound technology for remote display or any kind of display technology going into the future. There are many reasons hashed out to death about this. Yes you could continue to add new X extensions, and the second system effect is a real consideration, but neither of those are absolute arguments against starting fresh with…

> There are two seemingly irreconcilable camps at this point as to whether X itself is fundamentally sound technology for remote display or any kind of display technology going into the future. Are there? I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they? They just don't like some of Wayland's poor choices, which I think is fair.

>I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they?

I think "forward" is the wrong mindset here. X works. Plenty of tooling is just done, lots of people have their workflow just perfect, the whole ecosystem is mature, and at worst the Wayland devs decided to uproot the whole thing in the name of "progress".

Wayland could be nice, but its compositors require 10x the code that a WM would (which is why there aren't that many Wayland "WMs") and its supposed benefits aren't better enough to justify the ambitious rewrite. I could imagine a universe where Wayland did the minimum to replace X's jank and make the thing maintainable, and nobody would have objected to that IMO.

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

#62

Post by Qwertious »

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)?

I think Arcan can do that ( https://arcan-fe.com/ ). And arguably Plan 9?

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

Qwertious wrote: post #61
IshKebab wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two seemingly irreconcilable camps at this point as to whether X itself is fundamentally sound technology for remote display or any kind of display technology going into the future. Are there? I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they? They just don't like some of Wayland's poor choices, which I think is fair.

>I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they? I think "forward" is the wrong mindset here. X works. Plenty of tooling is just done , lots of people have their workflow just perfect , the whole ecosystem is mature, and at worst the Wayland devs decided to uproot the whole thing in the name of "progress". Wayland could be nice, but its compositors require 10x the code that a WM would (which is wh…

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by epcoa »

Qwertious wrote: post #61
IshKebab wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two seemingly irreconcilable camps at this point as to whether X itself is fundamentally sound technology for remote display or any kind of display technology going into the future. Are there? I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they? They just don't like some of Wayland's poor choices, which I think is fair.

>I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they? I think "forward" is the wrong mindset here. X works. Plenty of tooling is just done , lots of people have their workflow just perfect , the whole ecosystem is mature, and at worst the Wayland devs decided to uproot the whole thing in the name of "progress". Wayland could be nice, but its compositors require 10x the code that a WM would (which is wh…

> and at worst the Wayland devs decided

Those goddamn Wayland devs and their individual free will. How dare they not continue to maintain this miserable, crusty old spec and continue to make their marketable skills less valuable.

> Wayland could be nice, but its compositors require 10x the code that a WM would (which is why there aren't that many Wayland "WMs"

Nah, this is an ecosystem maturity problem that is improving rapidly. There will always be a few hold outs for the old way, but people will and are moving on. It’s silly to compare the number of anything with a project that had a 30 year head start.

> Wayland did the minimum to replace X's jank and make the thing maintainable

That’s called Xorg. It still exists and you are free to do whatever you wish, even invest in its development, Wayland didn’t “uproot” anything.

One of the biggest pieces of “jank” replaced is the nonexistent security model. You can research why the proposed SECURITY extension was unworkable and smarter people decided it was better to start from scratch. This benefit alone is better enough for most people with a stake to justify a rewrite.

In pure economic terms there is certainly a price where Xorg can continue to remain viable - this isn’t some ancient artifact lost forever. In this lens it’s hard not to see these comments as anything but unproductive bitterness at not being able to provide or raise these funds. It doesn’t help that part of this price is a direct result of the qualities of the thing you’re trying to save.

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

#65

Post by Qwertious »

epcoa wrote: post #64
Qwertious wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't think anyone seriously thinks X is the way forward do they? I think "forward" is the wrong mindset here. X works. Plenty of tooling is just done , lots of people have their workflow just perfect , the whole ecosystem is mature, and at worst the Wayland devs decided to uproot the whole thing in the name of "progress". Wayland could be nice, but its compositors require 10x the code that a WM would (which is wh…

> and at worst the Wayland devs decided Those goddamn Wayland devs and their individual free will. How dare they not continue to maintain this miserable, crusty old spec and continue to make their marketable skills less valuable. > Wayland could be nice, but its compositors require 10x the code that a WM would (which is why there aren't that many Wayland "WMs" Nah, this is an ecosystem maturity problem that is improv…

>Those goddamn Wayland devs and their individual free will.

That's not the problem. The problem is all the heckling for everyone to switch to Wayland, and to make it default. And also pretending that reversing the "mechanism, not policy" wasn't a fundamental change of philosophy and was just "progress".

And to be clear, by "at worst" I meant "this is the least-charitable interpretation".

>Nah, this is an ecosystem maturity problem that is improving rapidly.

TinyWM is 50LOC and wlroots's TinyWL is 900LOC. This hasn't changed. Writing Wayland compositors is a pain in the ass compared to WMs.

Wayland started in 2008 IIRC, so here in 2024 Wayland is 16 years old. It doesn't have teething issues, it just has issues.

Plenty of WM makers have just straight-up said they won't ever port their WM to Wayland (so talking about time and how "X is older" is irrelevant here), because Wayland's opinionation breaks too many things.

>One of the biggest pieces of “jank” replaced is the nonexistent security model.

You mean like how X clients can read keyboard inputs? There's so much FUD around this. /dev/keyboard does that already, you need to sandbox every app anyway - at which point your sandbox should just interdict the X interface. Security is the worst argument. Wayland isn't necessary for security, and for the longest time it's been locking the door and leaving the window open. Portals.

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

#66

Post by 1oooqooq »

epcoa wrote: post #53
immibis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that using extensions to support new features is much of a problem - if you disagree with that then you'll have to admit that Wayland has an even bigger problem because it requires even more extensions. X11 doesn't inherently require that many round trips. Xlib does, because Xlib is bad. But, for example, clients choose their own object IDs, so they don't need round trips to find the IDs of newly create…

> I don't think that using extensions to support new features is much of a problem You are arguing issues that were not even raised. Read 1st para more carefully, especially the last sentence. > X11 doesn't inherently require that many round trips. The complaint was about excessive round trips, Why do NX, x2go, and xpra exist if the X11 protocol over high latency networks is such a peach? It's lovely that clients don…

it's funny you redhat employees parot the business decisions of your employer so adamantly.

you did not address any point on your replies besides dismissal of them and trying to sho away the interlocutor. which you managed.

but i guess it works, yall won on all fronts that was done. congratulations i guess.

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

#67

Post by 1oooqooq »

epcoa wrote: post #39
aragilar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Somebody in a thread the other day lamented how almost always X clients are sensitive to network drops. And the suggestion is to use Xpra! (It’s “like tmux”) Xpra doesn’t forward X though, it is a rootless X server that then forwards everything as compressed bitmaps like VNC. It’s a nice homage to how awful X is even at its one oft purported benefit around here. X11 network transparency is a pretty poor technology, o…

and instead of x12 modernizing the network and access layer, breaking backwards compatibility with x11, they dropped those two features, and rewrote everything else which worked, and broke backwards compatibility.

it's hard to defend.

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

#68

Post by 1oooqooq »

minetest2048 wrote: post #60
npteljes wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

On that thread they mention virt-manager being deprecated, how can that be?

most libvirt stuff is just an attempt by google and redhat to take over qemu.

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

#69

Post by karma_pharmer »

delusional wrote: post #22
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. I…

proprietary/differentiated

this sounds scammy

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

#70

Post by karma_pharmer »

Zambyte wrote: post #59
znpy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What a strange comment. I was running applications over the network years ago using Wayland. Just because a new tool exists that you can do it with doesn't mean it doesn't work. Running software locally has been a requirement for at least a few years by my calendar, yet I don't see you complaining about their network-first-patch-local-after approach.

How dare you call my quarter-ass strange!

I demand a duel. Tablets at twenty paces. No BitBlts.

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