@roboneko @matrix @lanodan How exactly would you even do this with Wayland?

@sjw @roboneko @matrix There is https://github.com/any1/wayvnc for wlroots compositors been a while since I used it though so hopefully it's documentation is good.

@sjw @lanodan @matrix well lanodan answered which software to try. if you meant "how would that work", wayland keeps it simple by handing each app a private surface to draw pixels on plus some opaque callbacks for various things. so the app does whatever it wants to do with the gpu, cpu, whatever, writes whatever it wants out to the surface, and triggers the callback to tell the display manager that it's done

at that point the manager can do whatever it wants with the surface. usually that would be compositing it and updating the framebuffer on the gpu but it's free to encode it as video, save it to disk, send it over the network, whatever. the downside to this being that you're forced to stream video instead of draw commands which is very bandwidth hungry and if you use any compression on the video stream then text and other line drawings tends to become fuzzy. y'know, the usual VNC downsides that X can avoid in many cases

the upside is that it's conceptually simple so there isn't as much potential for weird glitches, unexpected security concerns, etc

@roboneko @sjw @matrix Also for wayland, everything the compositor does is on the GPU (unless you have no GPU or no drivers for it), so for a VNC kind of thing I would recommend encoding with an GPU-accelerated codec, as then shouldn't end up copying data, making it bandwidth efficient even at the level of your computer.

(OBS on sway with dmabuf does that)
(Also means that OpenGL games should involve no copying of things outside the GPU, which I think isn't the case in Xorg in many cases)

@lanodan @roboneko @matrix good to know