Comment by throw0101a

11 days ago

Does Wayland work on non-Linux systems (e.g. *BSD)?

If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can with X11 to XQuartz?

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throw0101a

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mghackerlady  11 days ago

Wayland works pretty well on FreeBSD and I know at least wlroots compositors work a bit on OpenBSD (though, I suspect anyone on OpenBSD would prefer to use their homegrown Xenocara). There are Wayland compositors for Mac, the youtuber Brodie Robertson did a good overview of them a few days ago

jeroenhd  11 days ago

Microsoft's WSL2 GUI integration works based on Wayland (and XWayland): https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

Rather than going fully protocol-based (like Waypipe), they used Weston to render to RDP. Using RDP's "remote apps" functionality, practically any platform can render the windows. I think it's a pretty clever solution, one perhaps even better than plain X11 forwarding (which breaks all kinds of things like GPU acceleration).

I don't know if anyone has messed with this enough to get it to work like plain old RemoteApps for macOS/BSD/Windows/Linux, but the technology itself is clearly ready for it.

ux266478  11 days ago

It depends on what you mean by send. Wayland doesn't have network transparency, there's a bit of a song and dance you have to do to get that working properly. I'm not sure the state of that or of Wayland compositors in general on Mac.

  • throw0101a  11 days ago

    > It depends on what you mean by send.

    Currently I can:

        $ ssh -X somehost xeyes

    and get a window on macOS.

    • gf000  11 days ago

      For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it.

      X's network transparency was made at a time when we drawn two lines as UI, and for that it works very well. But today even your Todo app has a bunch of icons that are just bitmaps to X, and we can transfer those via much better means (that should probably not be baked into a display protocol).

      I think Wayland did the correct decision here. Just be a display protocol that knows about buffers and that's it.

      User space can then just transport buffers in any way they seem fit.

      Also, another interesting note, the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web, if you look at it squinted. And quite a few programs just simply expose a localhost port to avoid the "native GUI" issue wholesale.

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