Firefox 75 due to be released next month should finally have its native Wayland support in good order.
Merged yesterday were the Firefox Wayland patches for VA-API video acceleration support in conjunction with FFmpeg.
And so the slow, almost never-ending march towards Wayland continues. I wonder if the march will ever end,
> I wonder if the march will ever end,
Unlikely.
When Wayland is bloated/convoluted as X11. I’m actually a big fan of X11 and network transparency. As always people want to make things less complicated, making things more bloated. Just look at interprocess communication. In the old days people handled UNIX domain sockets, today we have dbus and whatsoever. In the old days to write a decent application graphical application you needed to know C and Xlib, today it’s glib, gobject, dbus, gtk maybe and thousands of concepts just to get you going. Does all this really increase productivity, usability. I doubt it. Sad that so many do not just see the future on X11 ? Why does one really, I mean really ? need Wayland if X11 exists ?
“I’m actually a big fan of X11 and network transparency.”
No, X11 is not network transparent. This is in the sense that not a single modern application running on X11 supports that technical peculiarity. Network transparency was sacrificed many, many years ago in order to put some sense into how apps are rendered.
Well it actually works, and it even encapsulates OpenGL calls so that they use the clients graphics card.
On the other hand you are right in the sense that applications like firefox kind of do not care about it which make them really slow using it.
Then there is a question what is a modern application ?
Emacs – works, vmd – depends on the size of your molecule ? thunderbird ? all these applications have version from this year ?
sj87,
It still works for me.
I always liked that X11 would work remotely and was as easy to use as a local application. This was a killer feature back in the day when we had sun workstations at university and we could work remotely with remote windows appearing on the local desktop. Wayland has merits over the legacy X11 stack, but still it will be a bit sad to see the loss of network transparency.
Modern X11 apps “work” by doing complete copies of the window bitmap. It sucks even on gigabit Ethernet. It’s completely ridiculous that you need 10 Gbps data to make X11 “smooth.”
In the old days apps actually used X11 features such as server-side window managers, fonts, box and line drawing commands, etc.
No one does it that way anymore.
Wayland remote desktop over Pipewire is actually FASTER than X11.
Zan Lynx,
Well yes, however at the same time none of this is new. Back in the 90s more developers started using custom rendered widgets and entire frameworks like java used their own rendering engines. Applications that used their own widgets were easier to port. Many developers wanted their applications to stand out visually, others just needed more functionality than OS primitives allowed for. You are criticizing X11 for having to process this as bitmap data, which I don’t deny, but we shouldn’t omit the fact that alternative remote desktops (VNC, RDP, etc) also treat it as bitmap data. Your criticism is not an X11 specific weakness.
I would have agreed with you if you said X11 isn’t very efficient, but there’s no need for such exaggeration 🙂
https://pipewire.org/
It looks interesting, while it’s a young project, it could prove useful as it matures. I couldn’t find many videos on it in use though and the documentation is kind of vague. Will this be able to provide the sort of functionality that X11 had in terms of rendering individual applications on remote desktops? This remains a shortcoming for most remote desktop software.
Anyways, thanks for mentioning it!
These points have been answered by better people else where. I understand the nostalgia, believe me I do. And as others have pointed out there were some neat edge cases to network transparency ( even if it doesn’t do what it originally meant). The newer way of doing things is mostly better. I say mostly, because things like network transparency equivalent took forever for developers to add to the wayland implementations. Obviously have a way to do something, is better than no way to do it.
The recommended way to get a remote Linux desktop has been to setup VNC, XRDP, or NoMachine for years now. XRDP and NoMachine work much better then VNC or XDMCP, especially over long distances.
The world evolved, and X11 never did. It would be one thing if X’s remote feature was so much better then anything else, but it’s not. Windows has the best remote desktop solution.
Plus, the *nix world unified on SSH and the CLI as the remote access protocol and UI of choice.
It’s also not clear they’ve created something that is better then VNC or XRDP. I think they may be using screen scraping like VNC.
Anyway, it’s a pretty niche market since the demand for *nix terminal servers/desktop servers is ~0%.
Flatland_Spider,
As a user of VNC and other screen mirroring tools, I feel compelled to point out a fairly big difference between these technologies and remote X11 applications. The benefit of X11’s network transparency is that an X11 application running on a remote host looks and feels just like running an X11 application locally. When an application opens one or more windows, they show up on your local desktop with their own task bar entries and as far as the user is concerned they’re just like local applications. This is an extremely different user experience compared to what VNC and other forms of screen mirroring get us where the user is forced to treat the entire remote desktop as a single application window.
My own opinion is that VNC & nomachine are great remote administrative tools, but I really wouldn’t want to use them as part of my normal desktop workflow. The VNC solution quickly becomes jarring when you deal with many windows, some running on the local system and others running on the remote system. You end up instinctively trying to alt-tab between windows only to remember that the windows on the local and remote desktops are being managed by separate window managers and you have to keep track in your head which environment has keyboard focus. Again, VNC is great for remote administration, but pretty bad for treating remote desktop applications as if they are local.
IMHO it fits the same needs as remote windows terminal services. A long time ago when sun workstations were more relevant, it was immensely useful to be able to log into any of the unix labs on campus and have one’s desktop session & applications available from anywhere and even connecting from home. Think about the IT savings when you don’t have to worry about installing applications on individual employee computers and they can log into a new machine with zero downtime. Additionally running applications at the server provides more safety for confidential documents, consider that it’s not as big a threat for the company if an employee laptop is lost or stolen.
So, I would put forward that X11 network transparency really is an awesome feature, however I will concede that it is an enterprise feature that is largely overshadowed by the fact that most companies are running windows software and require windows compatible solutions such as RDP. Consequently I do agree with you that there is very little market demand for X11’s network transparency these days.
The “march towards Wayland” will be effectively over once normal users stop having to think about it, with legacy X11 programs using Xwayland so transparently nobody really thinks about it, so I think we’re pretty close.
I’d say the 80% threshold has been hit, and we can safely say the march is over. Firefox and Thunderbird are the only two applications which give me grief about running under Wayland.
The versions shipped as part of Fedora 31 are built with full Wayland support. No X11 needed, as far as I know.
Yep. 🙂
I’m running Fedora 31 and using the Wayland versions, which is why I’m getting grief from them. There are still things which need to be worked out. Not that many, but a few.
Kudos to them for bravely switching over though. Chromium still relies on XWayland.