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The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland

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  • Originally posted by curaga View Post
    I will, for the next few years. But as mentioned, the danger is that if Wayland catches on, we may lose the remotability of all apps from then on, as all new apps from then may be wayland-only.
    Is that a danger? You can already run weston as an X client. I don't know about the internals but I would think that it wouldn't be too far fetched to have each wayland client be rendered as a separate X window with some glue for supporting resizing etc.

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    • but say if I'm remoting from to windows to windows, where the toolkit elements are the same, would my idea makes sense? Is there a known implementation of this idea on Windows or any other platform?

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      • Originally posted by curaga View Post
        No, you send the window background once, and then the text is sent as text as the user scrolls. Not a continued image stream, as the background doesn't change.
        You don't have to send a continuous image stream anyway. If I understand correctly, in Wayland, the client only needs to send the needed changes to the surface to the compositor, not the entire surface every time a change is made.

        And if you need a remoting protocol that sends text as text... you know, we already have that, it's called SSH. If you just need to send text, it's perfect. You can play nethack or use the command line remotely or use any CLI app you want. But when it comes to GUIs, there just isn't any good way to send the information about UIs remotely, because you would have to define a drawing API and every app would have to use that drawing API, and any that didn't wouldn't be able to be used remotely.

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        • Originally posted by dee. View Post
          But when it comes to GUIs, there just isn't any good way to send the information about UIs remotely, because you would have to define a drawing API and every app would have to use that drawing API, and any that didn't wouldn't be able to be used remotely.
          X is proof that it can be done. All toolkits use the X drawing commands on the bottom, and thus all X apps can be used remotely.

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          • Originally posted by curaga View Post
            X is proof that it can be done. All toolkits use the X drawing commands on the bottom, and thus all X apps can be used remotely.
            no, they all send massive pre-composed images for almost everything.

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            • Originally posted by garegin View Post
              Daniel. I am a noob in graphics, so please bear with me.
              Isn't remote rendering something like MIDI or font equivalent for GUI? By that I mean, instead of sending compressed images down the wire you tell the remote computer the "elements" like window borders or buttons and then the client just retrieves them from a local source.
              Makes sense to me if you have a unified GUI like in Windows or OS X. Is this already being done in MS's RDP. Or is such a bad idea that no-one does it.
              it totally makes sense, but all the drawing is totally toolkit-specific, hence our suggestion to do this kind of thing at the toolkit level instead.

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              • Originally posted by curaga View Post
                Thanks for clarifying the official position. I get you don't want this repeated, but it's kind of hard to believe you're willingly throwing away a platform advantage, and a set of users with it.
                i don't think we are. x11 leans heavily enough on huge window-sized images that i don't buy wayland's client-side-only rendering as a regression from it.

                compared to a hypothetical strawman window system, i guess it's a regression, but then everything's a compromise when your competition has the luxury of not having to exist in the real world.

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                • Originally posted by daniels View Post
                  no, they all send massive pre-composed images for almost everything.
                  The only toolkit whose internals I'm familiar with is FLTK. It certainly draws text using the Xft API, not into a picture that is then blitted.

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                  • Originally posted by daniels View Post
                    it totally makes sense, but all the drawing is totally toolkit-specific, hence our suggestion to do this kind of thing at the toolkit level instead.
                    thanks for the clarification. is this being done, though, anywhere? windows, haiku, gtk ...

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                    • Originally posted by curaga View Post
                      The only toolkit whose internals I'm familiar with is FLTK. It certainly draws text using the Xft API, not into a picture that is then blitted.
                      Thus proving daniels (and the other wayland/x11 developers point). They actually know the details of the domain in which they are hacking.

                      You are arguing from ignorance. How about we trust their experience and technical acumen a little?

                      I cant believe I bothered to comment. God I hate the internet.

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