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September 15th was the 30th anniversary of the anniversary of X11
The X11 window system turns 30 years old today! X11 which still lives on through today via the X.Org Server on Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other operating systems is now three decades old.
It was on this day in 1987 that Ralph Swick of MIT announced the X Window System Version 11 Release 1. As explained in the announcement compared to earlier versions of X, X11 offered "This release represents a major redesign and enhancement of X and signals it's graduation from the research community into the product engineering and development community. The X Window System version 11 is intended to be able to support virtually all known instances of raster display hardware and reasonable future hardware, including hardware supporting deep frame buffers, multiple colormaps and various levels of hardware graphics assist."
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X11-Turns-30
[As a point of reference, Intel introduced the 80386 in 1985 and the 80386SX variant in 1988. --Ed.]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Alphatool on Sunday September 17 2017, @10:37AM (7 children)
Building X11 style remote rendering into Wayland might sound sensible at first glance, but once you look more closely it's actually a really silly idea. Wayland doesn't render anything anywhere - it leaves it up to client to put rendered content into a shareable buffer. This design makes the whole display process much simpler and allows lots of space for future improvement but it means network transparency is basically impossible at that level.
Is it really a loss though? Remote X11 is woeful for any modern software as it uses bitmaps rather than X11 drawing instructions. This means that it's basically a more cumbersome version of VNC with a crappy user experience. It's even worse than using RDP. I totally agree that better remote access wouldn't be a bad thing to have but Wayland isn't the place for it. A new protocol at the toolkit level (qt, gtk etc.) would be great, not sure if it will ever happen though. The growth of HTML5 means that web browsers have taken over a huge chunk of the remote application space and VNC is normally close enough if you absolutely need a full remote GUI for legacy purposes. I think there is every chance that conventional remote GUIs are close to dead and won't get much development for the foreseeable future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @01:04PM
So "modern" software paints itself into a corner, and somehow it is X11's fault.
And people wonder why there is so much "hate" (more like enlightened worry and suspicion, but "hate" is such a lovely debate short-circuit) regarding the Gnome project these days.
(Score: 3, Informative) by isj on Sunday September 17 2017, @01:25PM
Remote X11 is woeful for any modern software as it uses bitmaps rather than X11 drawing instructions
I find the speed acceptable on LANs.
WANs are another story. I used to use lbxproxy over a 128Kb/s connection for that but the results were not always great. Combined with a compression proxy I could get work done.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday September 17 2017, @04:10PM (3 children)
As someone who once made a block of shared MEMORY network transparent using mmap and a segv handler, I call bullshit. Now, my network shared memory was dreadfully inefficient mainly because it had to be bolted on to a protocol that never considered network transparency, but it actually worked, and didn't even need root access. And you're telling me nobody working on Wayland can even manage it when they control the protocol|? And you wonder why people like me say they will NEVER adopt Wayland?
BTW, X actually works quite well over a LAN and tolerably within the same metro area. It's far less clunky than remote accessing whole desktops. Using tools like Xpra, you can even dettach and re-attach to remote GUI software more or less the way screen works for text.
Your best argument is that you personally never do that thing that's so easy to do in X so it's fine if Wayland makes it impossible? What happened to that space for improvement? It sounds more like a once and for all lock in.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday September 17 2017, @04:42PM (2 children)
+1000. I use X in applications via ssh all the time. No way am I giving that up just because the freedesktop.org folks don't think it's necessary.
I actually didn't realize until reading the comments here that it was from freedesktop.org at all. What reason has anyone been given to trust those asshats? How long until it requires systemd as does Gnome?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @05:24AM (1 child)
I wish folks would quit posing this nonsense.
systemd is -not- compatible with *BSD.
GNOME -is- compatible with *BSD.
QED: GNOME does not require systemd.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:35PM
Bullshit!! All the folks forking stuff and writing fucking shims etc, and this [wikipedia.org] beg to differ:
No surprise you posted this AC.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday September 17 2017, @08:40PM
> This means that it's basically a more cumbersome version of VNC with a crappy user experience.
I find VNC useful as a remote control.
I find networked X11 useful to run the single window and copy paste from it, all with no additional setup over ssh -C -X. These are two different cases.
Instead of dumping X11 you should put it on top of wayland or use wayland as an X extension. Or you can adapt all gui applications to deal with the quirks of running on wayland with an updated gui toolkit. The upside is that after 10 years of trying that, very few old unported applications will be widely used.
But I think the drill is to restore the incompatibilities that makes some IT people stay employed.
Account abandoned.