Gnome 40 Introducing Headless Native Back End, Virtual Monitors

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-40-Headless-Virtual

by nikodunk • 5 years ago

69 29 5 years ago

kevincox• 5 years ago

The virtual monitors feature is niche but very useful when you need it. It is useful for screensharing when you don't have a spare monitor to use but want to arrange a couple of windows. It is so useful that people by dedicated hardware to convince their system to give them another monitor. (HDMI dummy plugs)

foobar33333• 5 years ago

Its useful for steamvr too which shows you your monitors so a dummy monitor gives you an extra monitor in vr

samus• 5 years ago

Is is about showing only a certain section of the screen where you have arranged those windows, instead of all of it?

rektide• 5 years ago

This is one of the sort-of-frustrating as-a-user things about Wayland to me, that every compositor (nee window manager) has to implement capabilities like this for themselves, where-as in X, there was common tooling. And they'll all have different userland tools to use these capabilities.

here[1] for example is wlroots/sway implementing headless.

That said, the implementations are great, & really show how much Linux has progressed. For a while it wasn't possible (for some reason I wasn't having good luck with either mdi or dp dummy plugs on my type-c only laptop), but I'm really looking forward to using one laptop as a virtual desktop for another desktop, & this work is core to that effort. I like a lot that Gnome was super smart & made outputting a virtual monitor as a PipeWire stream built in!! Smart easy win to make screen capturing even easier.

Edit: at my posting rate-limit, so tacking this on, especially to @spivak,

I like the diversity a lot, yes. But I still would like to see a situation other than gnome having it's own tooling to configure virtual monitors, wlroots having it's own, kde having it's own.

Is this just an insufficienct protocolization problem right now? Are there wayland protocols to do things like change a monitor's resolution? Or to change the mouse speed? I think of Wayland protocols as more between a running app and the compositor, which has all been nicely modularized & protocolized. But I don't understand what if any effort has been made to find a common ground to expose user tooling. It feels like they all have their own suite of command line utilities. Swaymsg in sway, for example. Whatever this virtual monitor tool gnome has. How do we begin to modularize these control interfaces?

[1] https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/commits/master/backend/hea...

neolog• 5 years ago

There could be another library providing these common utilities, which multiple window managers could use.

zbuf2• 5 years ago

Is there a library providing these common utilities, which multiple window managers could use?

sprash3• 5 years ago

Or it could be part of the Wayland protocol from the get go sparing everyone of major headaches.

At some point you arrive at a core functionality resembling X11 and you went full circle breaking everybody's workflow and tooling in the process for no reason other than severe NIHS.

chousuke• 5 years ago

It exists for Wayland: it's called wlroots.

Unfortunately, wlroots is only used by everyone except Gnome and KDE, who seem to prefer to do their own thing.

Spivak• 5 years ago

This is more a culture thing than anything technical. Wayland is meant as a replacement for X which is "just" the wire protocol that windows use to talk to the display server. But compositors like Sway, Mutter, and Kwin are angling to replace Xorg, the single monolithic display server that happened to speak X. Xorg could have just added Wayland support (in theory not in practice) and so the death of Xorg left a huge hole that everyone is trying to fill and no dominant project as emerged yet and Wayland has made it easier than ever to just DIY.

To me this is a good thing because having multiple competing implementations of a standard makes the standard authoritative and avoids the "do what Xorg does" problem.

sprash3• 5 years ago

angling to replace Xorg

The Xrandr extension enabling all this functionality is defacto part of the X11 protocol for a long time and not just "Xorg".

Xorg could have just added Wayland support

You already can run any Wayland client in Xorg with a simple Weston wrapper script. However since X11 supports DRI3 which is as efficient as Wayland will ever be it is completely pointless.

To me this is a good thing

Speak for yourself. For me standardization is a good thing. The "Desktop" is essentially a solved problem. There is no reason to invent a new incompatible standard every week. What is happening here is the opposite of standardization.

pedrocr• 5 years ago

It's a little bit more than just culture. The Wayland protocol has made the compositor, window manager and window server concepts a single thing whereas in X those are provided by different applications talking a standardized protocol. It did that for good reason and there are technical ways to then implement those parts with common code still. But since that sharing is not enforced by the protocol itself there's still duplication of things that in the Xorg world were more stabilized with no real competing implementations.

hollander• 5 years ago

ELI5 please. What is a headless native back end? These articles seem to be written for people who already know that it exists and what it is. How does that virtual monitor work?

AceJohnny2• 5 years ago

Desktop environments like Gnome assume the hardware on the machine they're running on is all the displays they'll ever have to deal with. "Headless" means there is no display (the "head" of the computer) connected to the machine.

This update allows Gnome to use virtual monitors.

deanclatworthy2• 5 years ago

This is fantastic. I have a box in the corner with no display attached and wasn’t able to RDP/VNC etc into it as there was no real display. I had mixed results with an abandoned virtual display package and ended up purchasing a tiny HDMI thing that plugs in the back and emulates a real display.

haldean• 5 years ago

Do you have a link for the HDMI dongle thing?

deanclatworthy2• 5 years ago

Yeah this is the one I ordered: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0788NPQFV/

Gnome 40 Introducing Headless Native Back End, Virtual Monitors

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