The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 13:21 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix) by marcH
Parent article: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

> The VNC / Remote Desktop / "desktop over desktop" user interface is completely broken. Two window managers on my screens? No thank you.

There is absolutely no reason why you can't have individual applications remoted. If people want Wayland to be configured to be able to send individual display buffers over the network rather then a composited desktop then that should be very possible.

> I've used remote X for as long as I've been using Unix. I do know how this works but it does work.

It works sorta.

For your specific use case, really.

At my work we use a wide variety of remote desktop and remote application using Citrix and Windows and the idea that Linux/X11 is competitive with what you can accomplish using something like Microsoft Windows is ludicrous.

> I'm happy to believe that X11 is an unmaintainable engineer's nightmare fixed by Wayland. But if Wayland can't do remote X in some way then it's completely useless to every work place I've been to, big and small. And no I don't care a bit about fancy 3D graphics.

X11 can't even do what you _BELIEVE_ X11 can do. For most applications you really end up just shoving huge textures over the network similar to what people do with VNC, only much worse.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 14:35 UTC (Mon) by dps (guest, #5725) [Link] (4 responses)

Fortunately X can do better than that---I have run 3D X clients using *faster* on a remote server with better 3D acceleration (and more CPU and faster memory). Any ideas of making the remote client do software rendering on the slower remote system would be a huge step in the wrong direction.

NX takes doing work on the *server* side much further: it does extensive server side caching and has amazing performance other links with high latency and low bandwidth.

X has its faults but storing things on the server so things like cut paste between clients running on different boxes work is not one of them. Nor is allowing clients to actually use the acceleration available on the server.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 14:51 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

X provides very little remote support for any OpenGL feature past 1.5, and nobody seems especially interested in fixing that.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:22 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually there have been suggestions (from Daniel Stone, IIRC) that might well get indirect GL working much much better with much less development overhead (IIRC the idea was to fall back to bitmap shuffling in situations in which you currently abort: yes, it's slower than hardware acceleration but at least it *works* and lets you do simple 3D stuff remotely which is just using it to do analogues of 2D-analogous stuff).

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:12 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

I suggested to do the rendering locally. Very few GL-using apps (apparently I need to disclaim this now, so let me be clear that I don't think they're marginal or pointless; just not the majority) these days have heavier geometry usage than textures. It comes down to Blender/Maya/etc, and CAD apps really. At that point, bandwidth-wise, you end up sending more over the wire than you would just sending the final post-composed image.

Then the more significant hurdle is updating GLX beyond GL 1.5, which as others have noted, is a hell of a lot of work.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 14:58 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> Fortunately X can do better than that---I have run 3D X clients using *faster* on a remote server with better 3D acceleration (and more CPU and faster memory). Any ideas of making the remote client do software rendering on the slower remote system would be a huge step in the wrong direction.

When the ability to get accelerated indirect rendering working on X I experimented with playing games over X11 protocol remotely.

It worked very well graphic-wise. But the controls were very laggy. So while the graphics rendered fast enough, the controls make it relatively unusable except under very ideal situations (ie: from one side of a lan to another)