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?
Now consider that most enterprises are about five years behind that. Takes a few years before what’s available in Fedora trickles down to RHEL, and a few more years before it’s rolled out to clients. Ubuntu is on a similar timeline.
The fixes you got two years ago might be rolled out in 3 years in these places. Oh, and these are the people forking up much of the money for the Wayland development efforts. The current state of Wayland if you pay for it is kinda meh.
RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022. RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg.
I agree that businesses lag, often by years. So the fact that RHEL is so far along in the Wayland transition kind of shows how out-of-date the anti-Wayland rhetoric is.
Exactly my point. The issues people consider ”solved” with wayland today will be solved in production in 3-5 years.
People are still running RHEL 7, and Wayland in RHEL 9 isn’t that polished. In 4-5 years when RHEL 10 lands, it might start to be usable. Oh right, then we need another few years for vendors to port garbage software that’s absolutely mission critical and barely works on Xorg, sure as fuck won’t work in xwayland. I’m betting several large RHEL-clients will either remain on RHEL8 far past EOL or just switch to alternative distros.
Basically, Xorg might be dead, but in some (paying commercial) contexts, Wayland won’t be a viable option within the next 5-10 years.
Well, we’re currently in the process of porting apps away from Windows Server 2012 and CentOS 7.
What you’re describing is just how the industry works, not specific to Wayland.
Those are terribly run enterprises. I work for a giant multinational that is widely considered to be obsolete tech-wise … I’m on fedora 42 on my work laptop. The team responsible for vetting, security and customising the deployment was ready day one.
Its 3-4 people catering for the ~2-3000 users that use the os internally.
I get the need for stability and repeatability in enterprise. I’m a sysadmin for more than 20 years.
That 3 year timeline could maybe move up a bit, even windows deployments are more or less up to date. Why would’t linux be?
Lastly, the more resistance to wayland, the longer it will take for it to reach a level of polish to where even you would aprove of.
When the switch became inevitable (distros defaulting, dropping x11), I installed it, lived with its crappy issues back then, reported said issues and moved on with my day.
Edit: I will say, one thing I still hate about wayland is the sleep behaviour. The 2 x11 systems I still use work well for this, none of my wayland systems want to wake up from sleep nicely.
Things like desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop etc. are incredibly broken, with no hope in sight because the core design of Wayland simply didn’t account for them(!?), apparently.
Add to that the decision to push everything downstream into compositors, which led to widespread feature fragmentation and duplicated effort.
Add to that antagonizing the largest graphics chipset manufacturer (by usage among Linux desktop users) for no good reason. Nvidia has never had an incentive to cater to the Linux desktop, so Linux desktop users sending them bad vibes is… neither here nor there. It certainly won’t make them move faster.
Add to that the million little bugs that crop up when you try to use Wayland with any of the desktop apps whose developers aren’t snorting the Koolaid and not dedicating oustanding effort to catching up to Wayland – which is most of them.
people dont like change
I cannot use Wayland.
I’m an average Linux desktop user, who has an Nvidia card, has no need for Wayland “security”, doesn’t have multiple monitors with different refresh rates, uses desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop on a daily basis, and uses lots of apps which don’t work perfectly with Wayland.
…how and why would I subject myself to it? I’d have to be a masochist.
Things like desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop etc. are incredibly broken, with no hope in sight because the core design of Wayland simply didn’t account for them(!?), apparently.
All of those things function on Wayland using the right protocols. If they dont work for you, either the DE/WM you use has not implemented the protocols, or the app you’re using has chosen not to implement Wayland support yet.
For automation there is ydotool and wlrctl. Ive also seen a tool called Hawck which seems neat, but I haven’t tried it.
I’ve never seen an issue with screen recording, OBS has worked fine with Wayland for a long time. I use GPU Screen Recorder on Wayland everyday.
Screensharing portals have existed for a while now, I haven’t run into any apps that still haven’t implemented them. Ive used it just fine on Discord and through multiple browsers.
Remote desktop also has a portal that any remote desktop app could implement. Rustdesk has experimental Wayland support which has worked for me. GNOME and Plasma also have built in RDP.
the cursor locking still happens in a handful of games for me - most work perfectly fine but sometimes i do end up running something with gamescope with the --force-grab-cursor argument to fix it.
this is when running games with either steam or wine/bottles/lutris.
strange that it happens in virualbox, i would think it “virtualizing” an entire display would fix issues like that. does virtualbox itself “grab” the cursor, or allow it to go off the screen by default? sorry i don’t really know virtualbox, never used it much
Whats rough?
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.
I will never understand what is rough. Ive been using fedora kde for what … 2-3 years now? More?
2 years ago there were some issues with nvidia, but that is fixed now mostly.
I use it for work, there is an ocasional hiccup, that gets fixed next reboot, something like a terminal not resizing just right but … thats it?
People dont like change man, in the day and age when tech changes at breakneck speed, people dont like change
Now consider that most enterprises are about five years behind that. Takes a few years before what’s available in Fedora trickles down to RHEL, and a few more years before it’s rolled out to clients. Ubuntu is on a similar timeline.
The fixes you got two years ago might be rolled out in 3 years in these places. Oh, and these are the people forking up much of the money for the Wayland development efforts. The current state of Wayland if you pay for it is kinda meh.
RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022. RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg.
I agree that businesses lag, often by years. So the fact that RHEL is so far along in the Wayland transition kind of shows how out-of-date the anti-Wayland rhetoric is.
Exactly my point. The issues people consider ”solved” with wayland today will be solved in production in 3-5 years.
People are still running RHEL 7, and Wayland in RHEL 9 isn’t that polished. In 4-5 years when RHEL 10 lands, it might start to be usable. Oh right, then we need another few years for vendors to port garbage software that’s absolutely mission critical and barely works on Xorg, sure as fuck won’t work in xwayland. I’m betting several large RHEL-clients will either remain on RHEL8 far past EOL or just switch to alternative distros.
Basically, Xorg might be dead, but in some (paying commercial) contexts, Wayland won’t be a viable option within the next 5-10 years.
What you’re describing aren’t issues with Wayland.
Your complaints are that you’re using old versions and poorly designed software.
Those aren’t Wayland issues they’re poor management and lack of investment
Well, we’re currently in the process of porting apps away from Windows Server 2012 and CentOS 7.
What you’re describing is just how the industry works, not specific to Wayland.
Those are terribly run enterprises. I work for a giant multinational that is widely considered to be obsolete tech-wise … I’m on fedora 42 on my work laptop. The team responsible for vetting, security and customising the deployment was ready day one.
Its 3-4 people catering for the ~2-3000 users that use the os internally.
I get the need for stability and repeatability in enterprise. I’m a sysadmin for more than 20 years. That 3 year timeline could maybe move up a bit, even windows deployments are more or less up to date. Why would’t linux be?
Lastly, the more resistance to wayland, the longer it will take for it to reach a level of polish to where even you would aprove of.
When the switch became inevitable (distros defaulting, dropping x11), I installed it, lived with its crappy issues back then, reported said issues and moved on with my day.
Edit: I will say, one thing I still hate about wayland is the sleep behaviour. The 2 x11 systems I still use work well for this, none of my wayland systems want to wake up from sleep nicely.
Things like desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop etc. are incredibly broken, with no hope in sight because the core design of Wayland simply didn’t account for them(!?), apparently.
Add to that the decision to push everything downstream into compositors, which led to widespread feature fragmentation and duplicated effort.
Add to that antagonizing the largest graphics chipset manufacturer (by usage among Linux desktop users) for no good reason. Nvidia has never had an incentive to cater to the Linux desktop, so Linux desktop users sending them bad vibes is… neither here nor there. It certainly won’t make them move faster.
Add to that the million little bugs that crop up when you try to use Wayland with any of the desktop apps whose developers aren’t snorting the Koolaid and not dedicating oustanding effort to catching up to Wayland – which is most of them.
I cannot use Wayland.
I’m an average Linux desktop user, who has an Nvidia card, has no need for Wayland “security”, doesn’t have multiple monitors with different refresh rates, uses desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop on a daily basis, and uses lots of apps which don’t work perfectly with Wayland.
…how and why would I subject myself to it? I’d have to be a masochist.
Are you a Debian Stable user perhaps? It feels like you have been trapped on an island alone and are not aware that WWII is over.
ive used all three on wayland without issues.
All of those things function on Wayland using the right protocols. If they dont work for you, either the DE/WM you use has not implemented the protocols, or the app you’re using has chosen not to implement Wayland support yet.
For automation there is ydotool and wlrctl. Ive also seen a tool called Hawck which seems neat, but I haven’t tried it.
I’ve never seen an issue with screen recording, OBS has worked fine with Wayland for a long time. I use GPU Screen Recorder on Wayland everyday.
Screensharing portals have existed for a while now, I haven’t run into any apps that still haven’t implemented them. Ive used it just fine on Discord and through multiple browsers.
Remote desktop also has a portal that any remote desktop app could implement. Rustdesk has experimental Wayland support which has worked for me. GNOME and Plasma also have built in RDP.
Not sure if it was a plasma issue or a wayland issue, but I tried it last year and had trouble with cursor locking.
Virtualbox had issues with the input being intermittent, and my mouse would move off the screen while gaming.
It might be fixed now, but I don’t plan on trying it again for another few years, because what I’m using works for me.
the cursor locking still happens in a handful of games for me - most work perfectly fine but sometimes i do end up running something with gamescope with the --force-grab-cursor argument to fix it.
this is when running games with either steam or wine/bottles/lutris.
strange that it happens in virualbox, i would think it “virtualizing” an entire display would fix issues like that. does virtualbox itself “grab” the cursor, or allow it to go off the screen by default? sorry i don’t really know virtualbox, never used it much