[GuB-42]

X11 remote access have worked really well for me. And the best part is that it worked even when the client machine has no graphical subsystem installed. I can launch GUI applications remotely with a non-privileged account and it shows on my machine as if it was native.

Wayland can use RDP and some other remote desktop protocols, but it is not what I want, I want a window, not a desktop. There is Waypipe now, I heard it works fine now, but I am still doing "ssh -X", because it just works.

The problem with Wayland is that it is very much "batteries not included". To all the things that worked well in X11, the response has been "it can be done, our protocol is very flexible, ask the guys writing the compositor", not "that's how is done". The result, Wayland is 18 years old and it is only starting to work well, with some pain points still remaining, and display forwarding is one of them.

It is funny you mention a "reasonable path" by the way, as it is exactly that problem, I don't want a "reasonable path", I want it to work, and after 18 years, I think it is a reasonable expectation. To their credit, it seems we are getting there: waypipe, and now window managers, we may finally have feature parity.

[ACS_Solver]

This is also where I'm at. I don't care what protocol or whatever is running underneath but I just want things to work and Wayland doesn't do that. It has lately been better, previously I would try Wayland and run into problems within minutes, recent attempts have given me hours without running into a problem. And as an end user I don't want to care that the problems I get aren't with Wayland but rather a particular compositor/WM implementation or whatever. I want it to work but it's only in the last year or so that basic functionality like screenshots has become reliable.

What gets me is how old Wayland is. It's now older than Linux itself was when Wayland started. It started in the era of 2.6 kernel series, when most software was still 32-bit, systemd didn't exist, when Motora Razr was more common than iPhones, when native desktop applications were still the norm, Node.js didn't yet exist and Google Chrome was a completely new beta browser. Wayland is now reaching feature parity and some kind of "it works out of the box, usually" state when it's from a completely different era of computing.

The nearest point of comparison is perhaps systemd, another Linux project that is very large in scope, complicated, critical and must interface well with lots of pre-existing software. Four years after Poeterring's "Rethinking PID 1" post that introduced systemd, it was enabled and in use on many distros. The conservative Debian adopted it within five years. Now it's been clearly a major success, but Wayland has been perhaps the slowest serious software product to be in development.

[prmoustache]

You have some weird memory, screenshots have been a solved issue for something like 6 or 7 years at the very least, if not a decade. I remember taking screenshots on wayland during the Covid era for instance.

[ACS_Solver]

Wayland experiences seem to vary wildly. It was most certainly not working fine for me six years ago. Well, six years ago I don't think I got as far as trying screenshots, I'd run into basic window placement or rendering issues that made the system unusable.

But say a couple years ago, I definitely had screenshot issues. Sometimes it just wouldn't capture a screenshot. Or I could only capture one monitor and not the other. Or I had graphical artifacts while drawing the snipping rectangle. Or the screenshot would be taken fine and fail to copy to the clipboard.

I'm well aware people's experiences are very different based on their setup and the implementations used but for me, last year was the first time I could do some work on Wayland without running into major issues, at least until I got to the part where I'd normally use ssh -X.

[prmoustache]

You have always been able to do ssh -X from a wayland client to a remote X as long as xwayland was running locally.

And waypipe has been solving this need to run a remote app on a wayland remote system. And it performs way better than X forwarding actually. With ssh -X you also need to remember obscure environment variables (looking at you QT) to not have unusable blank windows on some apps.

[blacklion]

And I want (wanted) both. And X11 cannot redirect whole display server until you start your session with some Xnest or other semi-standard middleware (nx?).

It is very convenient sometimes to access your locked session on big desktop from small laptop, do something, and later go to big desktop physically and unlock "local" termianl and continue with all same programs and windows without starting new session. This scenario were not supported by X11 very well, unfortunately.

[hedgehog]

I'll take a reasonable path over no path and just hoping VirtualGL or something will be enough and forgoing color management entirely. I understand that some use cases work better or only in X, but I also see the roadmap for Wayland and it looks like it will solve problems that I care about. While I know a little bit about graphics and GUIs, the people building all this infrastructure know much more and it seems likely that their judgement on how to solve these problems is on average better than people who haven't been working at that layer for a few years.