Network transparency argument

[jonsmirl at gmail.com]

2010/11/9 Kristian Høgsberg <krh at bitplanet.net>:
> On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 2:51 PM, David Eisner <deisner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 1:48 PM,  <Darxus at chaosreigns.com> wrote:
>>> The "network transparency argument" is pointless because network
>>> transparency via the X protocol will never go away.
>>>
>>> I think people who are concerned about this must not be aware that X
>>> clients already run seamlessly with Windows or Mac OS as the native
>>> graphical environment.
>>
>> Such ignorance may account for some concern.  But even those who know
>> that Wayland will support an X Server Wayland Client might be worried
>> for the following reason: Should Wayland become ubiquitous on the Free
>> desktop, it may come to pass that most (non-browser-hosted) apps will
>> be written as native Wayland clients. Let's say you really need to run
>> AppFoo on a remote system.  If AppFoo isn't an X client, you're out of
>> luck.
>
> You're right, using X for remote applications is not a full answer.  I
> do think HTML5 is a better answer than most people acknowledge, but at

People are definitely underestimating HTML5's capabilities, you can
even play Quake in it:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/google-html5-quake/

> the same time I agree that there may be a need to run native wayland
> applications across the network.  Wayland isn't a remote rendering API
> like X, but that doesn't exclude network transparency.  Clients render
> into a shared buffer and then have to tell the compositor the what
> they changed.  The compositor can then send the new pixels in that
> region out over the network.  The wayland protocol is already
> violently asynchronous, so it should be able to handle a bit of
> network lag gracefully.  Remote fullscreen video viewing or gaming
> isn't going to work well, I don't know any other display system that
> handles that well and transparently.
>
> Kristian
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-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at gmail.com