Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 15, 2012 23:41 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Wayland - Beyond X (The H) by khim
Parent article: Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

>You can not. You can write one such program, but it'll be exercise in futility because all other programs expect to use "network-transparent" VT100-based protocol.

Well, you can. By writing terminal emulation working within another terminal emulation. Sort of like 'screen' does.

But it kinda proves our point :)

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Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 16, 2012 0:41 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (3 responses)

What is your point exactly? That you like direct-mapped text consoles better than network-transparent ones?

That would take us back to the days of the Commodore 64, when remote administration was impossible. Of course, networking was primitive and clunky, so maybe that was a blessing in disguise. And of course the C64 NEVER experienced screen corruption. Oh wait, no, it did-- due to two things: flaky hardware and buggy software. The same things that cause screen corruption and other bugs today.

It's possible that HTML5 and similar technologies will make X11's network transparency obsolete. That might be a valid argument to make. Arguing that we should not implement network transparency because it hurts your poor little brain is not. It's a feature that people want-- deal with it. And yes, people would rather have something with a bug or two that does what they want than something simple and featureless which is only useful as a doorstop (like the Windows console.)

Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 16, 2012 1:07 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Our point is that local direct-rendering protocols work better than remote ones, given the same amount of work.

It's possible to design a good remote graphics protocol, but it's VERY non-trivial to make it perfect. It's so non-trivial that even simple text-based rendering is still imperfect after 35 years of development.

>And yes, people would rather have something with a bug or two that does what they want than something simple and featureless which is only useful as a doorstop

Would you use a car that spontaneously ejects a driver (even on a highway) sometimes but also has a nice set of skis for downhill car skiing?

I don't think so. And so do most of people. Besides, I'm seeing TeamViewer and Gotomeeting being used several orders of magnitude more than X remoting.

Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 20, 2012 0:23 UTC (Mon) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

Text-based rendering is imperfect on Linux for the same reason that HTML5 is a mess. Whenever you start talking about network protocols, you're talking about communication between different systems. It's a good guess that the vendors of many of those systems are competing with each other and have no incentive to make things work smoothly. In fact, they often have the opposite incentive.

> Would you use a car that spontaneously ejects a driver
> (even on a highway) sometimes but also has a nice set of
> skis for downhill car skiing?

There were 33,000 road fatalities in the United States in 2009. Cars are dangerous. But apparently people are willing to take the risk of driving them anyway. It's about risk versus reward.

> Besides, I'm seeing TeamViewer and Gotomeeting being used several
> orders of magnitude more than X remoting.

Gotomeeting is Windows software, so I don't see how it's relevant here. You might have stayed on topic and mentioned VNC or HTML5 as X11 replacements.

I wish the Wayland advocates would be more specific about what they are offering in exchange for network transparency. So far, all I've seen is "it's like X, but more efficient," which isn't exactly an inspiring battle cry. But I haven't had time to read all of the documents, just the short summaries that I come across.

Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 20, 2012 12:58 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

> I wish the Wayland advocates would be more specific about what they are offering in exchange for network transparency.

What Wayland brings to the table is simplicity. It's much simpler that X11 _because_ it doesn't have to support network transparency. And that's not in exchange of network transparency, you can run X11 on top of Wayland. Put another way: by removing the network from the equation, and unifying the server, window manager and compositor, you get a design that is workable, and can serve as the base for a remote protocol, if that's what you need, but without the penalty imposed in the local clients.