It seems you are implying you run X applications in a datacenter and have them piped to display locally. At that point, I have to ask, why? I’m sure you’re not alone, but this is not a common use case in my experience.
It seems like some applications have been adapting their architecture to deal with the remoting use case. VS Code is widely publicized for supporting it, but I personally also use Neovim which is capable of doing similar things, and IIRC even Jetbrains has been working on this. Of course, that covers code editing, but only code editing. So that still leaves a lot out. That said, these solutions have very good UX and portability, so it’s easy to see why people prefer that.
Let’s say the world went Wayland. What do you do about the other stuff?
Well, there’s not nothing that can be done. For one thing, while I do think that the XRender world of abstraction is basically going to die, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no way that remoting could be improved. For example… it’s possible that some day, a solution like VirGL could allow hardware acceleration over a waypipe tunnel.
And also, while Xorg is no longer being maintained, XWayland is still in scope for maintenance. So for the foreseeable future, you can still make use of X11 tunneling just fine under Wayland. Is this ideal? Maybe not. However, it’s perfectly practical, and therefore I don’t see why it wouldn’t be a decent solution. I expect mainstream desktops and apps to continue to support X11 apps for years to come, giving little urgency to worry all that much about the remoting case.
As usual with software, the old thing is always deprecated before the new thing is ready. I’m pretty confident that Wayland has made the right architectural choices for the future, and now all that’s left for us is to fill in the blanks.
It seems like some applications have been adapting their architecture to deal with the remoting use case. VS Code is widely publicized for supporting it, but I personally also use Neovim which is capable of doing similar things, and IIRC even Jetbrains has been working on this. Of course, that covers code editing, but only code editing. So that still leaves a lot out. That said, these solutions have very good UX and portability, so it’s easy to see why people prefer that.
Let’s say the world went Wayland. What do you do about the other stuff?
Well, there’s not nothing that can be done. For one thing, while I do think that the XRender world of abstraction is basically going to die, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no way that remoting could be improved. For example… it’s possible that some day, a solution like VirGL could allow hardware acceleration over a waypipe tunnel.
And also, while Xorg is no longer being maintained, XWayland is still in scope for maintenance. So for the foreseeable future, you can still make use of X11 tunneling just fine under Wayland. Is this ideal? Maybe not. However, it’s perfectly practical, and therefore I don’t see why it wouldn’t be a decent solution. I expect mainstream desktops and apps to continue to support X11 apps for years to come, giving little urgency to worry all that much about the remoting case.
As usual with software, the old thing is always deprecated before the new thing is ready. I’m pretty confident that Wayland has made the right architectural choices for the future, and now all that’s left for us is to fill in the blanks.