Greenfield Is Still Progressing As An HTML5 In-Browser Wayland Compositor

[microcode]

Alternative to remote desktop? Quick administration of remote servers without need to install any client locally.

Yeah, in no way did I mean to imply that it's not useful. I might in fact have an application for this at work.

[Vistaus]

Kind of. It doesn't include remoting at the lowest levels of the protocol, unlike X11 – and that's probably a good thing, since the X11 approach didn't really keep up with modern requirements, having been designed when the state of the art was 1-bit color and simple line drawing, rather than streaming HD video. But Wayland does leave room for remoting protocols to be developed at the compositor layer.

Shhhh, don't let the X11 fanboys hear ya, who will instantly correct you to tell you that X11 has been modernized.

[Delgarde]

Shhhh, don't let the X11 fanboys hear ya, who will instantly correct you to tell you that X11 has been modernized.

Oh, X11 as a whole has evolved a lot over the last 30 years... but the remoting aspect of it has two notable problems that can't easily be fixed.

One, the protocol was designed around drawing instructions – serialising commands like "draw a black line from X1/Y1 to X2/Y2" – and that doesn't work so well when modern usage is very heavily focused on images... it ends up being pretty inefficient compared to protocols that start from the assumption that everything is an image.

And two, the protocol effectively requires a permanent network connection... it's not *impossible* to write an application that can move from one display to another, and cope with loss of connection, but it's difficult that in practice, almost nothing actually does (XEmacs is the only example that comes to mind). Which makes it a lot less useful than something like RDP, where I can connect through VPN to my work desktop and see all the applications exactly where I left them. It's much the same reason that people use tools like 'screen' when sshing to a machine... you can leave stuff running without worrying about what happens if your VPN drops...