Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Posted Nov 7, 2010 17:55 UTC (Sun) by Simetrical (guest, #53439)
In reply to: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland by gmaxwell
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

"We have GPU acceleration already. Perhaps it could be made to work better. I'm all for that. I protest the idea that we must toss the very useful network transparency just to get the small incremental improvement that might come in cases where network transparency isn't being used."

Well, we aren't, are we? You can still run X on top of Wayland, and Wayland will presumably support other types of networked desktops. Every OS does, after all. Why do you think Wayland will wind up being less nice to use over the network than X in the end? I've found even NX to be almost unusably slow with even 50 ms latency, between uptown and downtown Manhattan. Regular old X forwarding didn't even work at that latency, practically speaking (taking minutes to even draw the window).

Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Posted Nov 7, 2010 18:57 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

if you could run Wayland apps on top of X you would not be tossing the ability to do things over the network, but the problem with the current 'plan' is to encourage people to write all new apps for Wayland instead of for X, and anything written for Wayland would not be able to run across the network.

different people have different tolorance for the effects of latency. while you consider 50ms unusable, other people have been reasonably happy with X over dialup (~300ms latency)

Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Posted Nov 7, 2010 23:23 UTC (Sun) by Simetrical (guest, #53439) [Link] (3 responses)

Wayland can bring its own way of running things over the network. There's no reason you can't have network transparency that's oriented around compressed bitmaps. If the application uses lots of bitmaps anyway, you won't use much more bandwidth, and if it's mainly text, then the graphics will compress very well if you choose the right algorithm. This is the way things like VNC work today. What's wrong with it?

The lag I saw in X forwarding latency is not a question of individual tolerance. When I tried regular X forwarding on Chromium, it took minutes to even draw the thing once at startup. It was not usable as an interactive application by any stretch of the word.

With NX, it was usable, but with lag of a couple of seconds on everything I did. This should not be necessary -- it should take exactly one round-trip for my mouse click to get to the other computer and all changes to get back. NX was taking dozens of times that. We live in an era of high latency and low bandwidth; the X way of doing things no longer makes sense. Pushing around bitmaps is a much better strategy, and will become ever more so with time, as network connections get faster and latency remains constant.

Unless I'm missing something, which is entirely possible, since I have only the vaguest idea of how anything related to graphics works. In that case, corrections appreciated. :)

Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Posted Nov 8, 2010 2:49 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

yes, Wayland could bring it's own way of running things over the network, but as near as I can tell they don't intend to. their attitude is that nobody needs that capability (or if they do, all they need is to run VNC to remote the entire desktop as bitmap images and deltas)

Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Posted Nov 11, 2010 18:03 UTC (Thu) by Quazatron (guest, #4368) [Link] (1 responses)

VNC is, in my experience, much better than X over the same link.

Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Posted Nov 11, 2010 18:41 UTC (Thu) by gmaxwell (guest, #30048) [Link]

Depends on the link. Over the a ethernet lan, 802.11a/n, or even the internet between my work and home (10ms rtt, >10mbit/sec file transfers) X11 is a big win vs VNC. I sometimes confuse myself a bit by starting something up on a remote system and only notice when I go to save and don't see my local file systems. Thats not a mistake anyone would make with VNC.

Over slower links VNC will stay usable (if slow) while X becomes useless.

There are various x protocol compressing proxies available for these situations, but I haven't had cause to use them for years. Networks got faster.