Wayland DOES Support Network Transparency!!

Key Takeaways

one of the most common complaints I'll see about Weyland is Wayland does not support network transparency and it never will usually those people link you to the Weyland FAQ is Wayland Network transparent does it support remote rendering no that is outside the scope of Weyland and sometimes they'll send you over to a mark shuttleworth blog from 2010. we don't believe X is set up to deliver the user experience we want with super smooth graphics and effects I understand that it's possible to get amazing results with X but it's extremely hard and it isn't going to get easier some of the core girls of X make it harder to achieve these user experiences on X than on Native Geo we are choosing to prioritize the quality of experience over those original values like Network transparency now I'm very skeptical of how many people actually rely on X Network transparency I'm almost certain that some of them do but can considering there's a lot of programs like Firefox for example which do not play nicely with it whatsoever I have my doubts but let's just say that every single person who says it's really important it's actually really important and they do use it on a day-to-day basis Weyland supports Network transparency it's different the way it works on X but it is there and I really want this myth that Whalen doesn't support it to die and I never hear about it again but before we get to that I'm sure a lot of you have just never heard the term Network transparency or you may have heard the idea but it was described with a slightly different term so nowadays when you run your system most people are running and rendering an application on a single computer say for example emacs you start emacs on the computer and then you use emacs from the same computer but this is not the only way that X works and X actually wasn't primarily used in this way when it was first being developed it was developed at MIT we'd have a big Mainframe computer and then different terminals would network into that computer those terminals didn't have the ability to run a full X server themselves so that big computer it would run the X server it would run the application station and then the graphical interface you would render on a completely separate computer over the network X can be controlled transparently over the network X is Network transparent but while this is not the way that most people are running X nowadays the idea of running an application over the network that's not gone away this idea Probably sounds awfully familiar to say Microsoft's remote desktop or any desk or how about gamer streaming services like steam Playstation or Xbox Remote Play whilst the tech Behind These Solutions Works fundamentally differently they are all different names for the same underlying concept rendering over the network so back to Weyland Weyland does support remote rendering most people just don't read past this first line to support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing the reason Weyland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients it's an interesting challenge a very big task and it's hard to get right but essentially orthogonal to what Weyland tries to achieve this doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Weyland it just means that you'll have to put a remote rendering server on top of Weyland one such server could be the xor server but other options include an RDP server remote desktop protocol a VNC server virtual network computing or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model which is a feature when you think about it layering xorg on top of Whalen has very little overhead but the other types are remote rendering servers no longer acquire exorg and experimenting with new protocols is easier so with VNC this came out of the olivetti and Oracle research lab in 2000 into the original implementation was under the GPO and many of the modern server implementations are also under the GPL as well also it is nice and platform independent so if you start using VNC on Linux there are clients on Linux there are clients on Windows there are iOS clients there are Mac OS clients and pretty much anything else you could want there is probably a client for as for RDP this is a little bit different this is a proprietary protocol coming out of Microsoft so the main implementation you know it's proprietary however that doesn't mean that people don't want to use RDP there is also free RDP which is a free implementation licensed under the Apache license if you're using RDP on Linux this is almost certainly what you're using okay that's great no but how does that actually help me well because these servers already exist and have existed for a couple of years now for example can gnome remote desktop remote desktop server which allows you to connect to your machine remotely this is both an RDP server and a VNC server if you're not using genome though you're not out of luck for example if you're on double your route you can use way VNC a VNC server for WL Roots based whale and compositors this is not going to work with gnome this is not going to work with KDE this is not going to work with Western this is just for double your route to things like River swaying things like that and then there are also things like waypipe Network transparency with Weyland waypipe is a proxy for whaling clients it forwards whale and messages and serializes changes to Shared memory buffers over a single socket this makes application forwarding similar to ssh-x feasible and the way you interact with it works in a relatively similar way to SSH as well as for a KD specific solution like The Gnome remote desktop right now I don't think that exists at least as like a core part of KDE If someone knows otherwise please do let me know and if it doesn't exist I wouldn't be surprised if something like that start to exist around kde6 as whale and becomes a lot more of a focus now I know someone's gonna say but aren't those Solutions bad maybe they are maybe they aren't I don't know when you're watching this video right now though they do absolutely have some problems for example there was this post from 10 months ago with the no remote desktop apparently at the time and I don't think it has yet it doesn't have remote login Sports so if the desktop isn't already logged in you can't log into the desktop this makes it unusable if you forget to log in that's a problem also it does require a genome extension to make it work properly after logging in yes absolutely a problem but it is there and these are problems that can be fixed those are things that you as a user can do but if you're a developer of a whaling compositor there is another option it is also possible to put a remoting protocol into a whaling compositor so you can have free RDP as a part of your composite you can have a VNC server or whatever thing you want to support either a standalone remote or as a full part of the full desktop compositor this will let us forward native wheel and applications the Standalone compositor could let you log into a server and run an application back on your desktop building the forwarding and to the desktop compositor could let you export or share a window on the fly with a remote whale and compositor for example a friend's desktop as that would be a fairly big undertaking I wouldn't expect most desktops to do it outside of the really big ones like gnome KDE or system 76 as Cosmic but if you want to do it and you know you want to run a dumb little experiment you want to just see how it works absolutely possible and you can make it happen and then you can say we have native Network transparency at the core compositor level have these RDP and VNC servers been developed as much as X11 Network transparency probably not especially when we're dealing with some of these smaller implementations maybe there's like a team of three developers who've worked on it and maybe it has some bugs and maybe it's laggy and maybe it crashes and maybe it doesn't work anywhere near as well as you want it to be working but that's not the point I'm trying to make here it's fine if it's buggy because bugs can be dealt with to say that Wayland does not support network transparency is an absolute lie and a complete myth it does it's just a work in progress and if for your use case X11 never transparency Works considerably better go and use it that's totally fair it's your system do what you need to do but Wayland does support network transparency and it is getting slowly better over time also it's fair to say that a lot of the tools that rely on X11 Network transparency will not work with these newer Solutions so you will need to change up the tooling you're using and a lot of tools like any desk for example don't currently support Wayland I would like them to and hopefully one day they will but if that's something you desperately need I can totally see why you would use x as well so let me know your thoughts do you rely on network transparency do you make use of VNC or IDP on a daily basis do you think the state it's in is currently good and have you used Network transparency on the Weyland side I would love to know so if you like this video go like the video and if you really liked the video and you want to become one over these amazing people over here check out the patreon scrub celebrate Linked In the description down below that's gonna be it for me and bugs [Music] [Music]