I like the idea of X forwarding, but it doesn’t work in real world anymore. As far as I know, it has to do many round-trips for everything. Launching something like LibreOffice Writer is funny, it will be loading bit by bit, icon by icon for several minutes. It was only usable for me on < 1ms network.

Unlike say VNC, it opens windows locally.

And now there’s Waypipe which does the same thing, but for Wayland. And it actually works! Even better than VNC.

BUT, it doesn’t work for X programs. It can somewhat work with rootful Xwayland… but that’s basically a desktop for X-only programs.

Welp, I just wanted to check something on the remote desktop, so I launched VNC, and WOAH, I didn’t expect to get XFCE invasion.
I didn’t know XFCE can do Wayland now.

Anyway, this cursed thing does actually work pretty fine. xfce4-session works with Waypipe, good to know.

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
    6·
    6 hours ago

    Using Waypipe, which proxies Wayland program GUIs to my local computer, just like ssh -X, but with Wayland, and it actually works over the internet (read: high latency).

    I didn’t know XFCE supported Wayland , so I casually ran vncserver, which launched xfce4-session, except that it attached itself to the Wayland display (proxied to my local machine) rather than X display of TigerVNC. And here come the full XFCE right to my local machine (which is running Plasma).

    • non_burglar@lemmy.world
      2·
      5 hours ago

      just like ssh -X

      No, that’s not what’s happening. X11 forwarding is telling the server to treat a TCP socket as a display, and after passing xauth, the frames are just shoveled into an ssh session. Waypipe is serializing Wayland messages so they can be redirected to multiple portals, specifically over a socket. They don’t really work the same at all.

      I didn’t know XFCE supported Wayland

      Some parts of xfce do, xfwm4 does not.

      so I casually ran vncserver, which launched xfce4-session

      This is because your vnc is configured to do so.

      except that it attached itself to the Wayland display (proxied to my local machine) rather than X display of TigerVNC. And here come the full XFCE right to my local machine (which is running Plasma).

      This part doesn’t make a lot of sense.

      If invoking xfce4-session works, it means you are doing so over vnc, not waypipe.

      • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
        2·
        5 hours ago

        Sorry about my Waypipe misunderstanding.
        vncserver I configured that way, so of course. I just didn’t expect it to connect to Wayland.

        If invoking xfce4-session works, it means you are doing so over vnc, not waypipe.

        It does work over Waypipe. You can even see in my screenshot that on the remote machine it shows Waypipe as the WM.
        The remote is running Debian 13, with multi-user.target set as default target to keep the GUI from starting. XFCE version is 4.20.1.