I’ll bite. It’s getting better, but still a long way to go.
No commercially viable remote desktop or thin client solutions. I’m not talking about just VNC, take a look at for example ThinLinc to see what I’m looking for - a complete solution. (Also, it took like ten rough years before basic unencrypted single user VNC was available at all.) Free multimillion dollar business idea right here folks!
Related to the above point - software rendered wayland is painful. To experience this yourselves, install any distro in VirtualBox or VMWare or whatever and compare the usability between a Xorg DE (with compositing turned off) and the same Wayland DE. Just look at the click-to-photon latency and weep. I’ve seen X11 perform better with VNC over WAN.
”We don’t need network transparency, VNC will save us”. See points above.
”Every frame is perfect” went just as well as can be expected, there is a reason VSYNC is an option in games and professional graphics applications. Thanks Valve.
I’m assuming wlroots still won’t work on Nvidia, and that the Gnome/KDE implementations are still a hodgepodge, and that Nvidia will still ask me to install the supported Xorg drivers. If I’m wrong, it only took a decade or so to get a desktop working on hardware from the dominant GPU vendor. (Tangentially related - historically the only vendor with product lines specifically for serving GPU-accelerated desktops to thin clients)
After over a decade of struggles, we can finally (mostly) share out screens in Zoom. Or so I’m told.
But what do I know, I’ve only deployed and managed desktop linux for a few thousand people. People were screaming about these design flaws back in 2008 when this all started. The criticisms above were known and dismissed as FUD, and here we are. A few architectural changes back then, and we could have done this migration a decade faster. Just imagine, screen sharing during the pandemic!
As an example, see Arcan, a small research project with an impressively large subset of features from both X11 and Wayland (including working screen sharing, network transparency and a functioning security model). I wouldn’t use it in production, but if it was more than one guy in a basement working on it, it would probably be very usable fairly fast, compared to the decade and half that RedHat and friends have poured into Wayland thus far. Using a good architecture from the start would have done wonders. And Wayland isn’t even close to a good architecture. It’s just what we have to work with now.
Hopefully Xorg can die at some point, a decade or so from now. I’m just glad I don’t work with desktops anymore, the swap to Wayland will be painful for a lot of organisations.
Rustdesk is an alright remote desktop option, although it definitely far from perfect. Wayland offers the support remote desktop needs, this is just up to someone wanting a solution enough to make it.
I agree that the “every frame being perfect” thing was dumb, but tearing support exists so its not really a complaint anymore.
Nvidia does work fine on every major Wayland implementation.
Screensharing works fine.
I understand the disappointment in how long Wayland is taking to be a perfect replacement to X11, but a proper replacement should absolutely not be rushed. X11 released 40 years ago, 15 years to make a replacement with better security and more features is fine.
Wayland has put a huge emphasis on improved security, which is also one of the biggest reasons some features have taken so long. This is a good thing, rushing insecure implementations of features is a horrible idea for modern software that will hopefully last a long time.
In its current state, Wayland is already good for the large majority of use cases.
What I’ve seen of rustdesk so far is that it’s absolutely not even close to the options available for X. It replaces TeamViewer, not thin clients.
You would need the following to get viability in my eyes:
Multiple users per server (~50 users)
Enterprise SSO authentication, working kerberos on desktop
Good and easily deployable native clients for Windows, Linux and Mac, plus html5 client
Performant headless software rendered desktops
GPU acceleration possible but not required
Clustering, HA control plane, load balancing
Configuration management available
This isn’t even an edge case. Current and upcoming regulations on information security drags the entire industry this way. Medical, research, defence, banking, basically every regulated landscape gets easier to work in when going down this route. Close to zero worries about endpoint security. Microsoft is working hard on this. It’s easy to do with X. And the best thing on Wayland is RustDesk? As stated earlier, these issues were brought up and discarded as FUD in 2008, and here we are.
Wayland isn’t a better replacement, after 15 years it’s still not a replacement. The Wayland implementations certainly haven’t been rushed, but the architecture was. At this point, fucking Arcan will be viable before Wayland.
Fair enough, I haven’t worked in an industry with requirements like that. Can you share an example of software you would use for a setup like that? I’m interested in learning more about it. I wonder how many companies are currently using a solution like that with Linux.
Wayland itself isn’t doing anything to prevent those solutions from working, but nobody has chosen to create a solution like that supporting Wayland. If the companies working on and funding Wayland need a solution like that, then they can make or fund it.
Right now, Wayland is good enough to be used on employee workstations for most peoples day to day work, because most people dont work at a company using a solution like you described.
After 15 years, Wayland is lacking some things X11 has, but has also far surpassed it in many ways. Linux is now usable on HiDPI and has proper color management. Companies like Redhat aren’t picking features at random, they’re prioritizing what their biggest customers need, because thats what makes money. Again, just to reiterate, Wayland supports the usecases you’ve described, but companies haven’t made software for this usecases that works with Wayland.
Wayland may not be a better replacement for you, but is sure is for a ton of users and organizations.
Your point is that it is still rough and then you bring up a bunch of stuff that is no longer an issue.
NVIDIA in particular is a solved problem with both explicit sync and open source kernel modules as the default from NVIDIA themselves.
RDP, Rustdesk, and Waypipe are probably going to eat into your billion dollars (and network transparency laments).
As stated in the article, opt-out vsync is already a thing (though not widely implemented yet).
I have not used GNOME in a while but KDE on Wayland is great. And the roadmap certainly looks a lot nicer than xorg’s.
I was on a video call in Wayland an hour ago. I shared my screen. I did not think about it much at the time but, since you brought it up….
If that is your full list, I think you just made the case that Wayland is in good shape.
RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022 and RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg as an option. Clearly the business world is transitioning to Wayland just fine.
GNOME and KDE both default to Wayland. So, most current Linux desktops do as well.
X11 will be with us a long time but most Linux users will not think about it much after this year. They will all be using Wayland.
Last I tried Rustdesk (two days ago) it was a buggy, glitchy mess and the shared screen was tearing immensely. Is that recent or did it use to be better?
I’ll bite. It’s getting better, but still a long way to go.
But what do I know, I’ve only deployed and managed desktop linux for a few thousand people. People were screaming about these design flaws back in 2008 when this all started. The criticisms above were known and dismissed as FUD, and here we are. A few architectural changes back then, and we could have done this migration a decade faster. Just imagine, screen sharing during the pandemic!
As an example, see Arcan, a small research project with an impressively large subset of features from both X11 and Wayland (including working screen sharing, network transparency and a functioning security model). I wouldn’t use it in production, but if it was more than one guy in a basement working on it, it would probably be very usable fairly fast, compared to the decade and half that RedHat and friends have poured into Wayland thus far. Using a good architecture from the start would have done wonders. And Wayland isn’t even close to a good architecture. It’s just what we have to work with now.
Hopefully Xorg can die at some point, a decade or so from now. I’m just glad I don’t work with desktops anymore, the swap to Wayland will be painful for a lot of organisations.
Rustdesk is an alright remote desktop option, although it definitely far from perfect. Wayland offers the support remote desktop needs, this is just up to someone wanting a solution enough to make it.
I agree that the “every frame being perfect” thing was dumb, but tearing support exists so its not really a complaint anymore.
Nvidia does work fine on every major Wayland implementation.
Screensharing works fine.
I understand the disappointment in how long Wayland is taking to be a perfect replacement to X11, but a proper replacement should absolutely not be rushed. X11 released 40 years ago, 15 years to make a replacement with better security and more features is fine.
Wayland has put a huge emphasis on improved security, which is also one of the biggest reasons some features have taken so long. This is a good thing, rushing insecure implementations of features is a horrible idea for modern software that will hopefully last a long time.
In its current state, Wayland is already good for the large majority of use cases.
What I’ve seen of rustdesk so far is that it’s absolutely not even close to the options available for X. It replaces TeamViewer, not thin clients.
You would need the following to get viability in my eyes:
This isn’t even an edge case. Current and upcoming regulations on information security drags the entire industry this way. Medical, research, defence, banking, basically every regulated landscape gets easier to work in when going down this route. Close to zero worries about endpoint security. Microsoft is working hard on this. It’s easy to do with X. And the best thing on Wayland is RustDesk? As stated earlier, these issues were brought up and discarded as FUD in 2008, and here we are.
Wayland isn’t a better replacement, after 15 years it’s still not a replacement. The Wayland implementations certainly haven’t been rushed, but the architecture was. At this point, fucking Arcan will be viable before Wayland.
Fair enough, I haven’t worked in an industry with requirements like that. Can you share an example of software you would use for a setup like that? I’m interested in learning more about it. I wonder how many companies are currently using a solution like that with Linux.
Wayland itself isn’t doing anything to prevent those solutions from working, but nobody has chosen to create a solution like that supporting Wayland. If the companies working on and funding Wayland need a solution like that, then they can make or fund it.
Right now, Wayland is good enough to be used on employee workstations for most peoples day to day work, because most people dont work at a company using a solution like you described.
After 15 years, Wayland is lacking some things X11 has, but has also far surpassed it in many ways. Linux is now usable on HiDPI and has proper color management. Companies like Redhat aren’t picking features at random, they’re prioritizing what their biggest customers need, because thats what makes money. Again, just to reiterate, Wayland supports the usecases you’ve described, but companies haven’t made software for this usecases that works with Wayland.
Wayland may not be a better replacement for you, but is sure is for a ton of users and organizations.
Your point is that it is still rough and then you bring up a bunch of stuff that is no longer an issue.
NVIDIA in particular is a solved problem with both explicit sync and open source kernel modules as the default from NVIDIA themselves.
RDP, Rustdesk, and Waypipe are probably going to eat into your billion dollars (and network transparency laments).
As stated in the article, opt-out vsync is already a thing (though not widely implemented yet).
I have not used GNOME in a while but KDE on Wayland is great. And the roadmap certainly looks a lot nicer than xorg’s.
I was on a video call in Wayland an hour ago. I shared my screen. I did not think about it much at the time but, since you brought it up….
If that is your full list, I think you just made the case that Wayland is in good shape.
RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022 and RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg as an option. Clearly the business world is transitioning to Wayland just fine.
GNOME and KDE both default to Wayland. So, most current Linux desktops do as well.
X11 will be with us a long time but most Linux users will not think about it much after this year. They will all be using Wayland.
Last I tried Rustdesk (two days ago) it was a buggy, glitchy mess and the shared screen was tearing immensely. Is that recent or did it use to be better?
Yeah, the few thousand users I managed desktops for will remain on X for the next few years last I heard from my old colleagues.
Because of my points above
But good that your laptop works now and that I can help my grandma over teamviewer again.