"Well yes it does result in a fractured feature. They Wayland people see the fracturing as a plus."

So does this mean that I wouldn't be able to say remotely display a desktop environment which uses QT and within that click a shortcut to a GTK app and expect it to open and be managed by that QT desktop environment.

That is the functionality we have now. Once you have your desktop environment displaying remotely everything you do looks and feels local. How can you have that when each app may have a different remote implementation?

>> Talking about Wayland not having remoting implying that Wayland applications won't remote isn't fair not accurate.

Yes it is. In my previous statement I chose QT and GTK as examples because they are so common. A user could have any number of applications using any number of GUI toolkits. Assuming they will all bother to implement their own remote access would way over-optimistic.

>> a) Supporters of network transparency don't know what network transparency is

There are many levels to look at things. You can look at electrons traveling through silicon or the behaviors of transistors combining to form logic gates. Skipping a lot of levels, further up you get all these software buffers, etc.. that Wayland supporters like to talk about. Some levels up from that there is an end user who sets their DISPLAY variable or runs "xorg -query ", etc.. and gets remote access to their desktop. Wayland supporters keep talking about those buffers and other low level things and saying that what goes on at that level isn't really network transparency. Ok. But the user doesn't care! I know I don't!

" You have to make choices. Deciding to help you is deciding to harm others. People who want better games (and BTW I don't game) are making the same argument you are in reverse."

  If I can watch a high definition video feed in real time over the internet then I should be able to remotely display a desktop or a user should be able to remotely display a game. The two should not be mutually exclusive. Surely it is possible to fix this in a way that pleases the gamer without screwing it up for the remote desktop user.

You probably are thinking I just proved your point but I did not. I said we should be able to remotely display our DESKTOPS. Not just individual programs. I should be able to see my favorite desktop manager and click shortcuts within it without worrying about which toolkit each uses. It should just work.. just like it does now.

Before you say.. VNC... nope. That is not the same. I use both remote X and VNC. My remote X server is configured to automatically connect when I turn it on. (It just runs xorg -query ) The very first thing I see is a login screen where I can log in as any user of the client computer. If I happen to have changed out the monitor.. well.. auto detection will have already adjusted my resolution accordingly.

I have three VNC sessions running in the background at all times. Two run under my login. One is just the perfect dimensions for my Lapdock. The other is the perfect dimensions for my iPad and happens to be usable though not great on my monitor at work. The third session runs as my daughter's user for her to log in. Most of the time all 3 are unused and yet all 3 are running because otherwise I would have to ssh in first and start them before I could use them.

" but there are many capable developers who deal with that kind of specialty "

Capable of developing a display server? Really? Why?

Until recently pretty much every *nix used X. Of course Windows and Mac also exist, clearly somebody develops those. There are a few outliers like Syllable & ReactOS. All in all I would think that the number of display servers or non-server systems serving that purpose could be counted on one's fingers.

If that's true... why would there be a bunch of available developers with the knowledge to do such things. What are they already working on and why?

"They do agree remote usage is an important feature and it is something they intend to add."
"They do agree it is something on their todo list."

Are you privy to something that I am not? According to the FAQ it is out of scope. I've watched the videos... all I see are statements that it is someone else's problem and that X doesn't do remote anymore anyway.* Wayland developers and supporters have even suggested that networking support be moved to the GUI toolkits. Surely that would result in a fractured feature that works differently on some applications than others and probably not at all on some.

Also... on the To Do list? Wayland is already being pushed in production. This should not happen with basic features still on the "To Do" list. I'm not sure if there are any desktop distros defaulting to it but there is Tizen. I for one have been looking forward to being able to remote display applications from my desktop on my phone or vice versa ever since I used my old Sharp Zaurus! Do you think it's too impractical on the small screen? I often worked this way on the Z'. I even occasionally did real work with SSH on a 3x2" screen with T9 keyboard Nokia Series 60 phone back in the day.

"A respectful comment from the anti-Wayland side! Well done."

I do not believe that there has been much respect coming from the pro-Wayland side. The attitude from the developers seems to be.. you are a minority.. you don't matter. The stuff you care about doesn't work now anyway (even though you are currently using it without problem) Non-developer Wayland supporters are even worse, accusing people who are concerned about remote display of being Neck Beards that are holding them back from getting 3d video acceleration. If the anti-Wayland side seems disrespectful perhaps it should be viewed as a natural response by a community under attack.

* - As Xorg developers I'm sure they know what they are talking about regarding X not doing remote anymore... on a developer level. So it's not really using the X protocol as originally intended when I display something remotely or something like that. As a user I really don't care. I just know that my application is displaying remotely. In other words... it just works.

"Remember that applications, especially those that are often used remotely, are likely to be somewhat delayed in how long before they switch to Wayland only versions."

To me it's not the ability to remote those applications that makes X great. It's the ability to remote the ones that most people would never even think of remoting.

Today the cloud is all the rage. The market is demanding it not just the 'geeks'. For an application that truly begs remoting I think the question isn't does the operating system support remoting it's "why doesn't the application have a built in web interface?!"/ (to the lay user X or Wayland is a part of the OS)

To me the fact that X allows me to display applications that the author never wanted me to display remotely is awesome. It's part of a broader environment of "I get to decide" what features are useful to me, not an application author, not the market or anyone else. This is generally the way Linux has worked until recently. For a system that makes these decisions for you, where the things a typical user would want just work a Windows or Macintosh desktop would be just fine. That need is already filled!

That is not to imply that it is only important to me on a basis of ideology. I happen to use a remote X terminal myself. i use it as though it were just another face of my main PC, not as a way to run specific, specially remote-worthy applications. It's a way that I can have one and only one highly customized desktop to babysit and yet have it in multiple places.

Which addresses exactly none of the deficiencies I brought up regarding VNC as a replacement for X.

Keep in mind this is pretty low level stuff. We aren't talking about coding yet another mp3 player (which is just a frontend for lame). We are talking about hardware drivers, video backend stuff, network protocols... I am a 'developer' myself but I would have absolutely no idea where to even begin working on something like this. Just listening to the Wayland developers talk about the internals of X vs Wayland and why Wayland is better gets me lost after a paragraph or two at most.

The population out there that is capable of working on a problem like this is probably much smaller than the population that might contribute to other aspects of open source software. Of those few that are qualified apparently none use this feature even though many of the rest of us depend on it.

Sure you can run X apps on Wayland.. For now...

Then distros will suddenly standardize on Wayland. Soon after X versions of applications will not be available. Then.. bye bye remote display. Were you still using that? If so then you are just a neck beard who is afraid of change and was holding up progress so that some poor kid's video game ran a couple of FPS slower. Your features don't matter but the gamer's needs do matter. I guess that makes sense seeing that video games are the only life many of those sorry slobs will ever experience anyway...

That just leaves them more air to spew about their gender conflict.

As an actual user, not just a developer talking about protocols try actually setting that up and using it. Supposedly that code is in the main branch but there is ZERO documentation about how to make it work. From what I have heard one of the developers wrote it in order to try to shut up all the people who were rightly complaining that a major feature from X was being taken away. Once he had a single demo it then went by the wayside. Does that code even work any more? Who knows, how would one even find out?

As far as I can tell remote Wayland was developed only far enough to be a publicity stunt and doesn't really exist in a usable state.

"If you need anything X of the above, or want to keep using xfwm, wayland already has a X-window server, so you can keep using it."

Which will mean squat if applications eventually stop supporting X.

"X network layer is super inefficient sending frames"....
so. It's always better than nothing and actually not bad over a LAN. As a developer you may be able to pick apart a million things it is doing wrong but as a user all I see is something that works verses something that doesn't even offer the same functionality.

"VNC is much better for anything else."

VNC, at least in any implementation that is available for a user to download is a solution to an entirely different problem. If you want to occasionally access an entire desktop remotely inside a window from another computer then sure, VNC is great. I just wish someone would implement sound support and built-in encryption so I wouldn't have to bother with SSH tunnels.

Where is VNC's solution for bringing displaying a single application remotely so that it seems to be running locally? Where is VNC's solution to creating a permanent remote terminal complete with login window?

VNC vs X is apples vs oranges.

It removed pesky features (such as remote display). Features like that ruin the simple appearance of pre-internet technology that is all the rage today.

-- ok, I have heard that one of the Wayland developers did some sort of remote display testing but as far as I can tell you have to pull his personal git fork, build it yourself and you get no documentation if you want to try to use it.

Brasero doesn't even find the burner until you install a bunch of Gnome stuff. Sure, you can still chose a different window or desktop manager and run Brasero but you still have to install a huge chunk of Gnome before it works!

In a pouch that clips to my belt. Not very stylish, I know but hey.. I'm already married, not trying to impress the girls. I can wear a shirt that hangs down and covers it 1/2 the year anyway.

My front pockets are for my wallet on one side, keys on the other. Nothing goes in the back ones for me to sit on unless it's thin like a piece of paper! I also keep my leatherman in with the phone giving me two reasons to keep wearing that.

A lot of my stuff IS that old. So long as you aren't using it for gaming hardware from back then was still pretty fast. Well.. 90% or more of what I do can be done with a web browser and a text editor so... what more do I need?

I still burn optical discs of Youtube videos to play in our DVD player for my daughter. Also, at least half of the computers I have to deal with, although their BIOSs have a boot from USB option it never works. A bootable CD... that always does the trick.