Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

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. :)