We almost got the old thing half-working, time to switch to the new totally-not-working thing! I love you, free software.
Recently I switched from Ubuntu's awful default whatever they call it to plain X11 with every newfangled thing disabled, and fvwm2. My satisfaction with my computer's performance is almost back to where it was in 1998 when my computer had 1% of these resources and for some reason double the performance. I'm definitely not looking forward to the next next thing unless it has a really great performance story incorporating all the lessons that whoever works on this stuff should have learned in the last 20 years.
Like you I have removed almost everything "Desk Top Environment" recently and have been enjoying the increased resources I get. I similarly hate that everything is getting intertwined so much that it is hard to actually pick and choose applications without taking a huge amount of cruft with it.
Having said that, if you look at the list of people working on Wayland it is quite impressive. As it contains a good number of core X windows developers, you would be hard pressed to argue that they don't understand the trade-offs that they are introducing. And while I haven't had time to play with it in any real depth, I've looked at Mutter's API and it is quite nice. Finally, I've actually tried Wayland (with Gnome and on top of Mutter by itself) and while there were still some problems at the time (about 3 months ago), I was actually able to get a full day's work done without much complaint. In fact, it is snappy and responsive and it mostly works.
I like exporting my X displays through ssh, so I really don't know if I will use Wayland seriously any time soon, but I think it is a good prospect for people who aren't me. I like the fact that this update from the Gnome guys shows that they are thinking, "Hey maybe not everybody will dump X. Let's try to find a place where we can showcase Wayland with the least inconvenience to conservative people".
IMHO, this kind of development is nothing but good. The real question is if Red Hat will take a less heavy hand in deployment of this as opposed to other "Let's reinvent the world" projects. As an option, I'm extremely happy to have it. If it gets wrapped up in everything so that I can't use any popular software without it, then I will be unhappy. But so far I see no signs of that.
Exporting X via SSH is still ultimately a bad user experience, since it's not portable.
The thing we desperately need is a desktop-session (Mutter-level) VNC server that will operate behind a lockscreen, so you can export a remote desktop locally or remotely and have it persist between logins.
As long as it supports root windowless mode, whatever works is fine for me. Also, it must work out of the box on most common distributions, without requiring extra software installation. Configuration is fine though, not even X11 forwarding is enabled on many platforms by default.
I have sadly seen nothing of value in Wayland that would be worth losing X11 over SSH forwarding. I really need some similar feature, and I am not aware of anything usable being available with Mir or Wayland. VNC doesn't cut it unless it can export single windows.
I am well aware that X11 tunneling is an aged piece of technology that is in serious need of facelift, but the new alternative to X11 should match the functionality. Before that happens, I will keep uninstalling Wayland and Mir, because the critical requirements (for me and my environments) have not been met.
> I am well aware that X11 tunneling is an aged piece of technology that is in serious need of facelift, but the new alternative to X11 should match the functionality
But many of the performance problems of X11 is rooted directly in features most of the user-base no longer uses (X11 as a network protocol being the prime example) and the work on a new protocol is being made specifically by eliminating the tradeoffs introduced by those features.
I welcome a newer, more performant option, but I guess it won't have anything to offer for your concerns.
Converting API calls into network messages is usually still a better option than something like VNC, which just tries to copy across images of the screen. Put VNC side by side with Windows RDP, and RDP's advantage is usually very clear. Unless many heavy assets need to be processed by the API before it can composite the screen, sending API calls ought to be better. Fancy 3D effects etc. in particular should be much smoother.
The bigger issue with X11 is its backwards server / client orientation. That optimizes for a rare scenario, and makes the more common situation - where you want to connect to an existing session with a bunch of running apps, and disconnect from it without blowing everything away - much more awkward to configure.
Weston already supports RDP (including desktop sharing). I believe newer versions of RDP can support a root windowless mode (so I'm not sure if Weston's RDP currently supports this).
Weston has a VNC server built in. Then if you have a desktop environment which uses Weston you'll be able to use VNC.
What has been added to the spec is being able to run one "compositor" in another. So you can have KDE/Enlightment running within/under Weston. I don't think that is the approach taken by GNOME though.
Like GP I am using an older desktop, OpenBox+ROX Filer, basically the same desktop I was using in 1999. Very fast over remote, maximally fast locally. Doubt I'll ever change.
The core NX compression technology was available to everyone up until 3.5.0. This sparked x2go, neatx, freenx and opennx. Are there any more derivatives to add to that list which we should thank NX for?
X forwarding is not really secure anyway if you are using it on an untrusted remote machine.
If you are an admin on a server and someone logs in with X forwarding then you can access his X server easily without any limitation (keylogger, screenshots, etc...).
The point being made here is that if I run an xterm on your machine (forwarded to the X server on my machine), then you can now access everything happening in the X server on my machine.
> Exporting X via SSH is still ultimately a bad user experience, since it's not portable.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'not portable' you can have X server on Windows..
And 'Wayland' export is even worse as it depends on whether the Wayland compositor support the export or not, AFAIK Weston is the only one which currently have an export display backend.
I think that you're suggesting to "stack" compositor to avoid this issue (not a new idea), I hope that this is what will happen eventually..
I believe he meant sessions being portable across devices. You cannot start a X application on your laptop, disconnect, switch to your desktop, continue using the application. (At least, it does not easily work out of the box. Allegedly it is possible in certain scenarios.)
VNC and other on-top approaches can do this (even with Wayland).
At the very least wayland can simply be used as a underlying graphics driver via XWayland, allowing for GPU acceleration of the whole of the X session without having to muck around with questionable WM hacks etc.
Not to sound cliche, but try Gentoo. It takes a bit of getting used to be it's concept of USE Flags are designed exactly because of "everything is getting intertwined so much that it is hard to actually pick and choose applications".
I've been toting around a custom fvwm2 config for 12+ years now, and every year or two I look at new features, then do a little research for how someone accomplished the same or similar in fvmw2, and modify it for my own needs (or just write it from scratch if needed). It makes for an interesting diversion for a day, and everything works exactly as I like it.
I've been using windows for the past two years, but prior to that people that sat with me for a minute while I did something would often comment "wow, what are you using?" The kicker was that the comment wasn't because it looked super great, but because it was effective and efficient. I found that much more satisfying than if they just liked how it looked.
Switch to FreeBSD, seriously. We don't always have the new shiny things that ubuntu or linux generally does, but it's rock solid; everything continues to work and the interfaces don't keep changing for no reason.
After recently seeing several articles related to FreeBSD (one of them was the Digital Ocean intro for linux users) I decided to play with FreeBSD 10.1 in virtual box. I liked pkgng, the "compactness" of the OS and several other features and after I successfully installed Xfce and Mate I decided to give FreeBSD a try on the bare metal, to see how it performs compared to Ubuntu and how many devices will recognize of the various devices (especially the Broadcom wifi which gave me some head aches under linux) on my Lenovo Yoga 2 11. The experience was very short. I was not able to boot any of the memstick FreeBSD images. 'Fatal trap 1 : privileged instruction fault' in the first milliseconds. After some investigation I had to give up cause there was no apparent easy way to bypass this panic. I knew that FreeBSD hardware support is behind Linux hw support but in my case it was very disappointing. Overall I like FreeBSD principles but I can't find any good use of it in virtual box (it's a step forward though, I remember that some previous FreeBSD version failed to boot even in virtual box).
I hear this type of opinion from time to time, and I honestly don't understand where it comes from. My computer back in 1998 didn't do nearly as much as my machine today, and yet my machine today responds to everything almost instantly. It's probably an order of magnitude faster than the Linux desktop that I had in 1998.
he's referring to Ubuntu's desktop, which, IIRC, is GNOME 3. You could have the latest CPU and 500 GB of RAM, and GNOME 3 will find a way to make it crawl. I always switch to XFCE now. But fvwm2 would also be quite an improvement.
Linux desktop in 1998 was super snappy. As long as you didn't expect much in the way of latest 3d graphics card drivers.
Recently I switched from Ubuntu's awful default whatever they call it to plain X11 with every newfangled thing disabled, and fvwm2. My satisfaction with my computer's performance is almost back to where it was in 1998 when my computer had 1% of these resources and for some reason double the performance. I'm definitely not looking forward to the next next thing unless it has a really great performance story incorporating all the lessons that whoever works on this stuff should have learned in the last 20 years.