Comment by coldpie
18 hours ago
> It's a shame Wayland dropped this.
It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days, there's a reason approximately no one has used remote X after the mid-90s. It's a neat party trick, but I don't blame the Wayland authors for not wanting to support it.
> one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows
In the 80s/90s this wasn't feasible due to network latency and bandwidth, but it's pretty common now to do exactly this, with VNC and other remote desktop protocols.
It is, there were tools like NX that made it entirely usable even latencywise. And these days we're really going more and more to remote computing.
In the time when wayland was invented it made sense because we did everything purely local. But now it's as outdated as X11 was in 2010.
And yes I still use it a lot. It works well. Networks have become a lot better and even most cloud compute I use is geographically nearby.
What made it slow back then was that I only had a 128kbit uplink at home. And the uni had 2 mbit for the whole computer science building :)
> In the time when wayland was invented it made sense because we did everything purely local.
People complained of no forwarding in Wayland when it was invented.
Like what? X forwarding has pretty much always been the thing most likely to work for me and I haven't been able to find any equivalent.
The big obvious one is web-based tooling. Your information & settings are stored on a server and you use a web browser to view it via whatever device you're on. For more locally based workflows, we have networked filesystem protocols, automatic syncing between systems, that kind of thing. It's not a 1-1 equivalent of running a remote program and viewing it locally obviously, but it gets the same job done, in a much more useful & flexible manner than X forwarding did.
For example, the remote mail client usecase I was replying to is simply done with a webmail client today.
I don't really feel like web interfaces or syncing are really a substitute tbh, and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens, and the program itself doesn't need to be designed differently to work
2 replies →
IIRC, it's not that secure though.. I'm really surprised people didn't do more things like send animated skulls to people's desktops.
Ps: oh yes and before '93 I've had so much fun practical joking around :)
Xauth fixed that way back in '93. All you have to do is use -Y not -X with SSH.