KDE Plasma Working On Wayland Screen-Sharing With XDG-Desktop-Portal / Pipewire

[dkasak]

The fact that in Wayland-land there is no standard for network transparency leaving it to window-manager specific and possibly not fully interoperable implementations is a sad state of things. It appears to leave Linux way behind not just Windows, but also behind yesterday Linux itself where Xorg and Xpra enabled both desktop level and application level operation over the network for any application and window manager.

It's only a step backwards, as you argue, if things that used to work stop working. That's not going to happen. We still have XWayland, and network transparency will still work as long as your application works in X. By the time toolkits and applications stop supporting X completely, there will definitely be other viable alternatives. Complaining that wayland doesn't works as a drop-in replacement for X, from day 1, is not useful and not valid.

[LinAGKar]

Call it hype, but I'd love to see the Wayland standardized remote desktop protocol use AV1 streaming as its transport. RFB nowadays is a horribly inefficient protocol compared to what mp4 and hls streams have demonstrated is possible. Maybe SPICE can be amended for it since AV1 alone doesn't provide IO signaling.

First, they would need to improve the encoding performance by a few orders of magnitude.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

and provide a very unprotected vnc at the moment

I wonder if anyone will ever start working on Spice implementation. xspice is dead end IMO.

Call it hype, but I'd love to see the Wayland standardized remote desktop protocol use AV1 streaming as its transport.

I'm afraid AV1 encoding speed does not allow to do that for next few of years. I guess Spice use MJPEG for video instead of AVC or VP9 for same reason.

[Guest]

Complaining that wayland doesn't works as a drop-in replacement for X, from day 1, is not useful and not valid.

I wanted to add that if it were a drop-in replacement, it would be repeating the same mistakes that X has and that Wayland supposedly wanted to fix, like the vulnerability to keyloggers.

[Guest]

zanny , RussianNeuroMancer - well, GPUs do have video encoding hardware for H.264, H.265, VP8 and now even VP9 - so we can actually use that to encode at a fast enough speed.

[Guest]

Looks like this is for sharing entire screen - what about granting access to specific windows though?

[RussianNeuroMancer]

zanny , RussianNeuroMancer - well, GPUs do have video encoding hardware for H.264, H.265, VP8 and now even VP9 - so we can actually use that to encode at a fast enough speed.

This could work only for workstation desktop sharing, but not in virtual machines (remote desktop to virtual machine could be useful if virgl is enabled, since virgl support only local view point). And even in workstations case right now I am not aware of any desktop software that can utilize VA-API encoding capabilities properly (i.e. it's not implemented in OBS and not working in GStreamer-based Pitivi, let alone kdenlive) so I don't expect any progress in remote desktop software at least for a few years - for some reason developers just use VNC as if it's only solution.