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Comment by KnightHawk3 | Hacker News Reader

How usable is wayland at the moment?

I did yet another quick search for "wayland remoting" and there still does not appear to be a well-supported story, so for me it's not even worth trying yet. In the age of IaaS and containers, who has just one computer?

It seems to me that something like xpra should be fairly easy to port to wayland. (For those who don't know, xpra installs itself as a compositing window manager, and then can render each window either locally or remotely).

A lot of people say "remoting wayland should be straightforward" but it keeps not happening. Either it's actually hard, or nobody on the project cares, which makes me question their judgment. Imagine how a display system would be received if it didn't support color on day one.

I think part of it is that the remoting situation on X is so bad that a lot of linux users just avoid it in favor of something like tmux or screen for remote work.

Remote desktop from the mid XP era just blows away anything that X has up to now.

What's so bad about it? I sometimes do "ssh -Y" from OSX to use some GUI tools on a server and it works pretty much to my expectations.

ssh -Y will work find on a LAN, but higher latency links are a really bad experience; X11 is a very chatty protocol with a lot of round-trip delays. On top of that, you cannot detach from such sessions. If e.g. your ssh connection gets reset, you lose any unsaved work in the program.

Traditional VNC servers allow detachable sessions, but the local use is kind of crummy.

Tools like x11vnc are closer, but they lack options to lock the display on the local machine, which is something remote desktop has done by default since at least windows 2000.

Yes, I can see that. It certainly isn't ideal and I wouldn't do something crazy like running a web service based on this technology. However at least within a LAN it's good enough and I wouldn't want to loose this capability for the sake of 'moving with the times' (wayland).

Mostly usable unless you use nVidia or AMD with the binary drivers. AMD are going to be supported in the near future via their open-source amdgpu driver (for GPUs from 2015 onward) and nVidia will show up with a new driver that will support Wayland, any day now, we "promise".

Four years ago, Nvidia displayed no interest in supporting anything other than X, what has changed for them?

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