Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 19:38 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop by rgmoore
Parent article: Gentoo looks back on 2025

> X11 does have some advantages, like network transparency, that support real-world use cases.

Wayland is _more_ "network transparent" than X11 -- because the "normal" behavior for X applications for the last two or so decades is to bypass "the network" via various extensions (xshm, dri, etc etc), and the network-capable fallback paths are increasingly bitrotten, if they were ever written to begin with. Combined with client-side rendering becoming the overwhelming norm and an inherently chatty protocol, this places X is at a huge performance disadvantage when operating over a network.

All of that adds up, so in real-world terms 'waypipe' tends to make for a much more pleasant end-user experience than ssh -X (ie the mechanism that everyone is using when they say "X11 network transparency") -- and once you step off of local high-speed low-latency LANs the difference becomes even more pronounced.

...Just last night I was accidentally using inkscape on a remote system to work on an SVG file; I didn't realize it wasn't local until I couldn't find the file I had just saved.

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Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 13, 2026 14:09 UTC (Tue) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (3 responses)

From a network protocol perspective, something "slightly enhanced screen-scraping" like RDP is perhaps a sort-of local optimum, considering the development interest/manpower isn't just there to make a "proper" remote-transparent next generation X-like protocol. Or to the extent we have such, it's the web platform with http+html+js and not a 'traditional' GUI toolkit.

That being said, one thing I love about X remoting is that it's so convenient when using ssh -X (or -Y). When you have logged in to some remote system and are working there, and if you need some gui app you just launch it with "app &" and it pops up. No need to explicitly login to some remote desktop etc. like when you're using some RDP/VNC client. Is there anything like that in the pipeline in the wayland world?

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 13, 2026 14:22 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Is there anything like that in the pipeline in the wayland world?

'waypipe' has been around since 2019.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 13, 2026 14:43 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

There's waypipe, which understands Wayland protocol and tunnels it over a network. It knows about DMABUFs, SHM objects, and a few other bits where Wayland protocol passes a reference to a kernel object over protocol (done via a file descriptor), and converts those into compressed data over the wire, but otherwise tunnels protocol unchanged as-if you were on a local system.

IME, it's better than X remoting over "Internet" latency connections - Wayland has very few round-trips baked into the protocol, so latency is less perceptible.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 13, 2026 15:29 UTC (Tue) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

Thank you, from reading the man page I found online this seems exactly what I was looking for.

(I'm on Ubuntu LTS here which due to my GPU driver defaults to X11, so haven't bothered playing around with wayland much yet. But I guess in half a year or so when I upgrade to the next release it'll default to a wayland session.)