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by ulrikrasmussen 45 days ago
For me, TUIs compensate for the fact that I can't get good remote GUI rendering on Linux. Yes, X11 tunneling exists, but the experience has always been abysmal for me for anything not hosted on a machine that sits on the same LAN as the client. For Wayland I don't even know if such a thing is possible since I don't think the architecture supports it.

But the terminal is just fundamentally the wrong basic abstraction on which to build a structured GUI, it just happens to require few enough bits to be sent over the wire that it actually works reasonably well over SSH as opposed to pushing graphics.

3 comments

> For Wayland I don't even know if such a thing is possible since I don't think the architecture supports it.

Not only forwarding is trivial with Wayland, it also tends to provide better experience than X11 does.

I have never tried it until now, and I hadn't looked into it. But I just tried `waypipe ssh` to a remote server I have for doing asynchronous Claude work in VMs, and it actually works pretty great! Maybe I'll switch to that for my emacs/magit setup, the lack of clipboard integration when running emacs in a terminal over ssh is enough of an argument for me.

Edit: yikes, pressing M-w caused emacs-pgtk to crash with a Wayland protocol error, so it isn't trivial and requires some configuring I guess.

Edit 2: Apparently I have to install wl-clipboard and write a bunch of emacs lisp to work around this. I don't think I have the patience for that, and I fear that such problems will be even harder to solve for applications which are not as flexible and programmable as emacs. So far I'll conclude that remote Wayland is not ready and stick to TUI.

Edit 3: No, the problem is probably mismatched waypipe versions on client and server. Still not fun.

> Yes, X11 tunneling exists, but the experience has always been abysmal for me for anything not hosted on a machine that sits on the same LAN as the client.

I have used X11 tunnelling to machines on the other side of Europe and it was OK. I did prefer ssh for responsiveness. What happened to NX? What about other remote desktops?

You can use Sunshine streaming on Wayland just fine. I have a headless sever with Sunshine and a Wayland desktop and can stream it remotely with great quality and minimal latency.

That said for most tasks I would still rather SSH in and use CLIs (not TUIs).