Does Wayland work on non-Linux systems (e.g. *BSD)?

If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can with X11 to XQuartz?

▲ johnny22 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It is in freebsd's official handbook, and the openbsd folks have been playing around with it since 2023 at least https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html

I'm not sure how much farther along they are than that post though.

▲ jeroenhd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Microsoft's WSL2 GUI integration works based on Wayland (and XWayland): https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

Rather than going fully protocol-based (like Waypipe), they used Weston to render to RDP. Using RDP's "remote apps" functionality, practically any platform can render the windows. I think it's a pretty clever solution, one perhaps even better than plain X11 forwarding (which breaks all kinds of things like GPU acceleration).

I don't know if anyone has messed with this enough to get it to work like plain old RemoteApps for macOS/BSD/Windows/Linux, but the technology itself is clearly ready for it.

▲ mghackerlady 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wayland works pretty well on FreeBSD and I know at least wlroots compositors work a bit on OpenBSD (though, I suspect anyone on OpenBSD would prefer to use their homegrown Xenocara). There are Wayland compositors for Mac, the youtuber Brodie Robertson did a good overview of them a few days ago

▲ ux266478 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It depends on what you mean by send. Wayland doesn't have network transparency, there's a bit of a song and dance you have to do to get that working properly. I'm not sure the state of that or of Wayland compositors in general on Mac.

▲ throw0101a 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> It depends on what you mean by send.

Currently I can:

    $ ssh -X somehost xeyes

and get a window on macOS.

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NoGravitas 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Today you would do:

`$ waypipe ssh somehost foot`

You need waypipe installed on both machines. For the Mac, I guess you'll need something like cocoa-way (https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way). Some local Wayland compositor, anyway.

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gf000 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it.

X's network transparency was made at a time when we drawn two lines as UI, and for that it works very well. But today even your Todo app has a bunch of icons that are just bitmaps to X, and we can transfer those via much better means (that should probably not be baked into a display protocol).

I think Wayland did the correct decision here. Just be a display protocol that knows about buffers and that's it.

User space can then just transport buffers in any way they seem fit.

Also, another interesting note, the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web, if you look at it squinted. And quite a few programs just simply expose a localhost port to avoid the "native GUI" issue wholesale.

	▲	throw0101a 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it. I used run and use diskless SparcStation 5s with remote X on 10BASE2 network with the binaries running on Sun E3500s: it worked well enough for non-video web sites running Netscape 3.x. Also Matlab, Octave, Emacs, Vi(m), etc. I've used it to run backup application GUIs when I was still on DSL (<25Mbps) displaying at home many years ago, and it worked well then. I now have >100Mbps fibre at home, so doubt that bandwidth (or even latency) is worse.
	▲	ux266478 44 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it. This is extremely misleading. Web browsers (and games) are the worst case for X11's network transparency. The overwhelming majority of applications belong in the same category as xeyes. > the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web It's Arcan, which solved this problem without sacrificing network transparency at the altar.

▲ torstenvl 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, but still kind of WIP.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/