Greenfield: An In-Browser HTML5 Wayland Compositor

[waxhead]

This is cool, but what is it good for?

How about a very flexible remote desktop session without any limits. You could watch movies, play games, create stuff in blender, edit music and just about anything you would otherwise do from a traditional desktop. Very convenient if you manage multiple machines. Also perhaps very risky, but quite cool indeed!

[sarmad]

I can see the point. If your software runs in a browser, it is as cross-platform as it gets. The distribution is quite convenient (you type an URL/you scan some QR code and you're running the software) and everybody already has the runtime environment (and by now, it even updates automatically for most people). It is not a native executable, but neither are Java or C# applications. The main issue (other than the fact, that it's not compiled, which I still consider necessary for performance-critical code) I have with it, is the fact that JavaScript is not a very pretty language, but that issue is being worked on, and that it still lacks good libraries in many areas.

There is no point in building your app against a low level protocol like Wayland and then trying to run it on Windows and Mac. Use a high level framework, like Qt, and your app will be as cross platform as it gets.

[dkasak]

The point is ... it's another way to deliver linux desktop apps to non-linux users. It's not meant to compete with a regular wayland or X desktop. It's a bridging technology.

[Delgarde]

This is cool, but what is it good for?

Hypothetically, a remote desktop?

[johanb]

How about a very flexible remote desktop session without any limits. You could watch movies, play games, create stuff in blender, edit music and just about anything you would otherwise do from a traditional desktop. Very convenient if you manage multiple machines. Also perhaps very risky, but quite cool indeed!

But if you are doing everything remotely anyway, what's the point of the browser part? Why not just implement a wayland compositor to a remote desktop client like VNC and throw away all the browser crap?

Extra layers are good if they make a abstraction for developers with little performance cost, and a whole browser implementation is not a minor performance cost.

[Delgarde]

But if you are doing everything remotely anyway, what's the point of the browser part? Why not just implement a wayland compositor to a remote desktop client like VNC and throw away all the browser crap?

Because a traditional remote-desktop client needs special software installed, and often requires some effort to get through firewalls. But pretty much every desktop or mobile device has a web browser, and running over an HTTP-based protocol will work almost everywhere.

[dmitriis]

VDI use-cases come to mind when I read this.