And it doesn't even mention the valuable features of X11 that were considered out of scope for wayland, such as network transparency.
It's really super useful being able to just fire up a program on a remote SSH session and get the window on my local computer. Without having to set up VNC and a window manager etc etc on the remote computer.
Of course this feature also needs a big review. It needs proper security (though tunneling over SSH fixes a lot of that) and there's too many back-and-forths in the protocol leading to it being really sluggish over high-latency connections. Makes sense as it was mainly invented for X-terminals on a local network. Also, more and more features like fonts are now rendered remotely instead of locally on the user's computer (the server in X terminology). NX and X2go fix that mostly but it would be great to have this in the actual protocol. As well as provisions for smooth video streaming.
As well as that, the whole computing industry is moving back from powerful endpoints (PCs) to powerful central computing (now cloud, the mainframes/powerful unix servers in the early days of X). So really, this feature will become more important again.
But yeah I would really prefer to see X11 being brought up to date rather than Wayland. Wayland is focused way too much on the local desktop.
X (at least nowadays) isn't very network transparent. Most things are done via shared buffers (it's faster than shoving bitmaps down a socket), with special fallbacks implemented by the clients, so that x forwarding doesn't break.
I know, also font rendering with anti-aliasing is usually done on the client side now (though the old way with font servers was far from ideal, it was much more bandwidth efficient!).. I know it's not perfect but they do this because the protocol lacks support for smooth video.
I'm just advocating a modernised X over moving to Wayland altogether, like the poster I replied to.
It's really super useful being able to just fire up a program on a remote SSH session and get the window on my local computer. Without having to set up VNC and a window manager etc etc on the remote computer.
Of course this feature also needs a big review. It needs proper security (though tunneling over SSH fixes a lot of that) and there's too many back-and-forths in the protocol leading to it being really sluggish over high-latency connections. Makes sense as it was mainly invented for X-terminals on a local network. Also, more and more features like fonts are now rendered remotely instead of locally on the user's computer (the server in X terminology). NX and X2go fix that mostly but it would be great to have this in the actual protocol. As well as provisions for smooth video streaming.
As well as that, the whole computing industry is moving back from powerful endpoints (PCs) to powerful central computing (now cloud, the mainframes/powerful unix servers in the early days of X). So really, this feature will become more important again.
But yeah I would really prefer to see X11 being brought up to date rather than Wayland. Wayland is focused way too much on the local desktop.