FOSDEM: The Wayland display server [LWN.net]

FOSDEM: The Wayland display server

Posted Feb 21, 2012 11:52 UTC (Tue) by alankila (subscriber, #47141)
In reply to: FOSDEM: The Wayland display server by HelloWorld
Parent article: FOSDEM: The Wayland display server

Yes, it is a hard problem to solve, especially if you want to solve it for all software there is... I'd personally settle for far less: it's enough to me that *one* reasonably good toolkit does it, especially if it's GTK+ or Qt: most software already exists for both of these toolkits, so you just have one more reason to avoid the worse one.

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FOSDEM: The Wayland display server

Posted Feb 21, 2012 13:23 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

I disagree with this. I'm a KDE user, yet I also use quite a few GTK+ applications because their Qt alternatives either don't exist or suck, for example wireshark, emacs and leksah. Considering this, a remote GUI that can't handle at least GTK+ and Qt would be next to useless in my opinion.

Also, you didn't explain how to solve the issue of differing GTK+ versions between the client and the server.

FOSDEM: The Wayland display server

Posted Mar 1, 2012 13:10 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

For that matter, I still run one single Xt application: Emacs. That's because Gtk dumps core if its X session goes away, making the emacs server mostly useless: the bug for this has been open for years and appears unfixable. Now maybe this problem will vanish with Wayland (as it relates to Gtk keeping stuff on the X server but not keeping track of it so it can resend it if the X connection dies)... but maybe not. Demonstrably the Gtk hackers do not care about use cases like remotely running an application which maps multiple windows, then unmapping all the windows so you can suspend the machine on which the display is done.

Because, after all, saving power by suspending your machine when not in use while leaving your processes running on another machine so they can keep doing background jobs is a rare use case, unless you jam the word 'cloud' in there, whereupon it suddenly becomes immensely important. Or something.