Remote Desktop Backend Merged into Wayland 215
New submitter Skrapion writes "One month ago, an independent developer submitted patches to the Wayland's Weston compositor which adds support for FreeRDP, an open-source remote desktop protocol. Now, after six revisions, the remote desktop code has been merged into the trunk. While remote desktop has been prototyped in Weston once before by Wayland developer Kristian Høgsberg, this is the first time Wayland/Weston has officially supported the feature. For a summary of why we can expect Wayland's remote desktop to surpass X.Org's network transparency, see Daniel Stone's excellent talk from Linux.conf.au."
Re:And why is this better than VNC? (Score:5, Informative)
Presumably RDP can handle rootless windows. VNC does not have that option at this moment. That means that RDP will work much like xforwarding and be usable over ssh, whereas with VNC you need to start a VNC-session and click around on the desktop to start programs.
Re:Rootless? (Score:5, Informative)
You would be wrong then. RDP 6.1 along with Windows Server 2008 introduced RemoteApp which allows a single application to be forwarded rather than a whole desktop.
Re:Those who do not understand X11 (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody understands X11 then, because Wayland devs are also X11 devs. Enjoy.
That You, Fanboy? (Score:0, Informative)
Hmm. A pedantic retort that completely ignores the root issue. Are you one of the fan boys, or am I misinterpreting your post?
The issue is that the end user functionality of using remote desktop like features under X11, Xorg, Wayland, all suck massive balls when compared to the likes of RDP and ICA. The only thing close to being as unpleasant to use as X11 is VNC. They may have been the best available in 1995, but they have sucked since then and continue to do so today. Any attempt to defend them in this regard is a clear indication that the defender has never used the the other products or attempted to do an real graphical work over a connection of less than 10Mbps.
RDP is no panacea. But, it is many times faster than X11-esque methods, most especially on lower bandwidth connections.
Re:For those About to Whine! (Score:3, Informative)
The very fact that FreeNX exists is absolute proof that X has fundamental issues and you have admitted that those issues exist and that another layer of complexity needs to be added around X is a direct admission that X isn't cutting it!
You also lied in your original post when you said you forward over X and therefore X is transparent.
1. No you don't forward over X, you use a much more convoluted FreeNX setup.
2. Forwarding != Transparency. If you think it does, then FreeRDP is also network transparent! Modern X is basically a less-efficient screen-scraping version of RDP, and everything that FreeNX does makes X more like RDP in a kludgy manner!
3. Please stop insulting X developers who have put a whole lot more time and effort into developing these systems than you have ever done. If you were more respectful you'd actually watch the video in TFA and come up with an intelligent response instead just repeating over & over that "I GOT AN XTERM TO FORWARD EVERYONE ELSE IS STUPID!"
Being disingenuous and hiding the truth.. which is exactly what you did in your original post when you said "X" and really meant the kludge-fest that is "FreeNX" is also a form of censorship, so try being more honest and less sanctimonious, self-righteous, and obscene in the future, mkay?
Re:An important feature for me (Score:5, Informative)
I used NX for X11 over VPN. It works very well and I am able to resume where I left off if my VPN connection drops or I want to let something run overnight but don't want to remain online. NoMachine closed source their server at version 4.0, but FreeNX and Neatx took its place.
Re:That You, Fanboy? (Score:4, Informative)
I think what the poster was referring to is that client-side rendering is now the norm. This has brought us nice fonts and compositing, among other things. So yes, most X11 apps are just sending bitmaps to the server. No longer are modern X-based applications asking the server to render text and buttons and shapes for it. Yes this does decrease remote performance. And modern toolkits like GTK do require a lot of server round trips, which makes things hard to deal with over a high-latency link.
I remember running Xemacs over a modem and it ran great remotely, since it was mostly just asking the server to draw in its behalf. Worked very well, but compared to modern apps, was very ugly.
Re:And why is this better than VNC? (Score:5, Informative)
Actual Information from the FreeRDP Project (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rootless? (Score:5, Informative)
Essentially, the client can request a bitmap representation of an element, or the native UI component. For example, common UI components are sent as UIElements and SkinParts. SkinParts can be sent as vector items (like gradients, lines, etc), or bitmaps themselves. So, for example if you run calc.exe, the client can request the app as a stack of UI elements (essentially, how the GDI plans on drawing the components to the screen). All the buttons, etc. are sent as a component package which describes how the element should look. If it uses a bitmap as a part of its chrome, it is sent as a separate SkinPart.
You can also get bitmap representations of components if the OS thinks it is too difficult to draw them (or the developer just threw a bunch of bitmaps together to represent common UI components). When this happens, calls into the GDI update the RDP server to let it know that a component of size X/Y at X/Y has updated. It's a lot smarter than VNC which has to watch the screen and updates the screen in a 1/x method.
X11 is a bit more primitive... It expects the UI components to be created and skinned by the client. This is really only useful/consistent if both the client and the server are running the same WM. Users of RDP get the same experience regardless of their client.