@RL_Dane XOrg is basically unmaintained at this point, so not really, it is well past its prime anyway. And X11 has not had actual network transparency for decades now.
You can look into "Waypipe" for a Wayland option, the screen sharing of individual windows is really up to the sharing protocol, not the display server.
Also, there are open PRs to make Barrier work but progress is slow. Hiding the mouse while typing would be something that happens in the server.
@RL_Dane Well yes, but this is not conceptually much different from X11. Back when people thought X was going to be the next big thing, there used to be different X servers that supported different extensions, and you could not use some X clients if your server didn't support the right extensions.
For various reasons all those other servers stopped getting developed though, now there is only one server that anyone cares about...
@RL_Dane They are, it’s called XWayland. :p On a serious note though, my experience with X over a network has been terrible for like a decade. Nearly everything uses shared memory framebuffers now, and they work for absolute crap over a network compared to VNC or RDP. Only having it for older X programs where it actually works well enough to use is pretty ok with me.
NOT WRONG. X11 Network transparency only works well when you're using actual graphical primitives, not pixel pipes.
I desperately wish all of *X's graphics systems could be renovated with display PS as the underlying layer, and GTK/QT/TK/WxWindows/Enlightenment/Rust/etc using some kind of actual postscript vectors as primitives, rather than just pooping out pixels. :/
@RL_Dane Well again, that's kind of the rub. So much of modern graphics is about being able to push around pxiels as a generic primitive. We have gobs of RAM available to do it now, and it's fast because it's amenable to hardware acceleration, and easy to make compliant implementations of.
@RL_Dane I guess you can decide if I'm biased or not as I write software that pushes pixels every day. OS X was originally based around DPS actually, though again HW acceleration I think put a lot of nails in it's coffin. Most everything moved to CoreAnimation surfaces a decade ago instead.
@RL_Dane Well, it's a big step forward if you want things that animate smoothly, and efficiently while consuming less battery power. ;)
Re: Quartz, probably most of what it was used for was pushing bitmaps, but the core of the API was all based around paths and clipping and such. I've never actually looked at the PS rendering model, but I assume it's that sort of thing since that's what Apple's docs say. >_<
@RL_Dane It's also worth pointing out that the X.Org devs are the Wayland devs. It's not an us vs. them, but that the only people still working on X decided it was time to stop trying to extend a 40 year old protocol in ways it was never intended. Not much activity in the repo any more, and a lot of it is for xwayland specifically.
You make a good point. I only learned recently that the Xorg organization is in charge of Wayland as well. I also know that a lot of the Wayland devs are former Xorg devs that made herculean efforts to maintain Xorg and finally had to throw up their hands in exasperation.
I really don't want to force anyone to maintain a gnarly hack on top of a gnarly hack on top of a gnarly hack. I just wish that RH would consider more than just casual users when making decisions like that. There are still a lot of applications where Xorg is the only answer, and where Wayland-related technologies doesn't provide the features needed.
@RL_Dane I mean I get it, but as a counterpoint, Fedora has kind of become a bleeding edge distro. Pushing new tech is kind of it's thing, and IMO that's fine in a world where Debian exists as an alternative for people that need a slow moving base instead.
@RL_Dane yeah pretty much, if it hasn't been in the FSF Newsletter the last few years I've run apt-get upgrade and accepted everything and that's about it 😉 Looks like Wayland is there, but to my knowledge I'm not using it packages.debian.org/buster/x11…
If RDP has a FOSS server now, I won't begrudge it.
But I still want individual window sharing.
Even if I only use that a couple times a year, #Wayland won't feel complete to me without it.
I understand that it's only pixels, and not primitives. I'm sad that that is what we're stuck with, but I don't see any way out of it unless QT & GTK decide to agree on a low-level graphics infrastructure (and have something above pixels be the greatest common factor).
@RL_Dane@sirber Well realistically the only options are pixels and 2D vector graphics. The latter means getting stuck with and API designed decades ago (like with X), and limits a lot of options for HW acceleration (especially when talking about unknowns in the future). It also still needs to provide bitmaps anyway and a lot of applications (like browsers) will only be able to use that to render anyway.
I mean, that doesn't mean that someone couldn't create a browser that "rendered" webpages into vector primitives, but yes, you're right. There isn't any such thing yet, at least, not anything fully-featured and interactive.
@RL_Dane@sirber Actually... that does bring up a good point. The "modern" version of postscript is the web, and that's gotten so complicated that there are only 2 compliant implementations of it left. Careful what you wish for... >_>
If the web is a modern version of anything it's X11 -- an overcomplicated hack of an overcomplicated hack.
But at least with the web, you can dig down to bedrock and find... a hypertext system?! Basically Wikipedia 0.1! And it turned into this flaming poopshow?! YUCK!
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