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Chris Siebenmann over on his personal web page at the University of Toronto writes about X networking. He points out two main shortcomings preventing realization of the original vision of network transparancy. One is network speed and latency. The other is a too narrow scope for X's communication facilities.
X's network transparency was not designed as 'it will run xterm well'; originally it was to be something that should let you run almost everything remotely, providing a full environment. Even apart from the practical issues covered in Daniel Stone's slide presentation [warning for PDF], it's clear that it's been years since X could deliver a real first class environment over the network. You cannot operate with X over the network in the same way that you do locally. Trying to do so is painful and involves many things that either don't work at all or perform so badly that you don't want to use them.
Remote display protocols remain useful, but it's time to admit another way will have to be found. What's the latest word on Wayland or Mir?
Source : X's network transparency has wound up mostly being a failure
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:47AM (15 children)
Propaganda "solutions" to technical problems are a thing these days
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:12AM (1 child)
Be fair, wayland is going somewhere....
X networking is fine for xeyes, if there was :
1. a list of the subset of programs commonly available on unix systems that work via Xs' network transparency; or
2. a list of the subset of programs that don't and why
it may get more credit.
I know I want it, just never got it to do anything useful at a usable speed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:20AM
Anything that use the GPU to accelerate something is likely to cause you problems, because those invariably bypass X to talk directly to the hardware for some blinkered reason.
(Score: 5, Informative) by KiloByte on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:25AM (3 children)
This. X works fine for me, including network transparency. Wayland does not.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:56PM (2 children)
Is network transparency even planned for Wayland? (Honest question, because I don't know).
Wayland devs have already admitted they are no better than X at security, and won't let you run root Graphical apps as joe user.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @01:01AM (1 child)
Wayland is going to use Microsoft RDP. Rough quote from a wayland dev about using RDP was, "...a case where worse is better."
For the very rare case that I need to use a remote gui application, X forwarding has worked fine for me.
Some of what I have read about wayland worries me that we are in store for systemd experience redux-- e.g., devs hostile to server-side WM decorations. But, I'm reserving judgment for now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:23AM
And that quite reminded me of some old unix text that compared MIT with some other university, and claimed that MIT often got stuck trying to find perfect solutions and thus never getting anything out the door.
And it may well seem that with the relative success of the Linux ecosystem, the MIT mentality of perfection has set in, and the likes of Wayland (and perhaps also systemd) is the result.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:29PM (6 children)
New strategy of entryism then destruction is the new meme replacing the old "embrace extend extinguish"
Next up for the entryists to destroy will be SSH, CRON, shell scripting as a technology.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:07PM (5 children)
Next up for the entryists to destroy will be SSH, CRON, shell scripting as a technology.
M$ has forked OpenSSH and has been using it to attack the original project upstream. Cron is threatened by Red Hat's systemd. (Red Hat now has way too many "former" M$ staff, especially at the higher levels, though Poettering himself is probably somewhat independent from that.) And M$ has also set its sights on the shell, eventually they will be in a position to attack it full on, but so far that has only manifested as a gimmick called PowerShell. Prior to that M$ was content to get people to disparage the shell and get them to parrot about the "command line" being difficult and old-fashioned. Regular people are finding out that it's neither, so M$ had to change tactics and PowerShell is part of that new attack.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:32PM (2 children)
Technological solutions don't exist to moral problems like this. In the end they may destroy F/OSS entirely just because they can, they have money, and people will let them. I despair sometimes...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:55PM (1 child)
In the end they may destroy F/OSS entirely just because they can, they have money, and people will let them. I despair sometimes...
Because they can. That's been the M$ modus operandi for decades and it still is how they work. Each and every time they have ever gotten in a position to harm other projects or businesses, they go full out to do so, even if it puts them at a disadvantage for doing so. They prefer to kill the other businesses and projects when the chance arises and they can. They have always done so enitrely just because they can. Examples are buried in some of the court records published on Groklaw's archive which contains all kinds of stuff including EEE [groklaw.net]. However, in regular news archives there are plenty of examples dead business partners that somehow thought they would be the first company ever to survive a partnership with M$.
The part about people letting them do so is IMHO the real problem. Canonical, for example, could have gone far if they had not gone out of their way to alienate the FOSS community by allowing M$ entryism via Mono and co. That was followed up by bringing in loads of "former" M$ staff to stock key positions. Then came systemd ...
If you despair only sometimes then, relatively speaking, you are quite the optimist.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:29AM
Funny you should mention Mono, because one of the big names behind mono is also the instigator of Gnome, and seems to always having harbored a lust of the Microsoft ecosystem...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @06:06AM
> (Red Hat now has way too many "former" M$ staff, especially at the higher levels, though Poettering himself is probably somewhat independent from that.)
So the only person that could actually be *improved* from MS influence is the independent one? Figures.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @12:40AM
Poettering, and quite a few fellow RH employees (in particular those working on Fedora as a side show), think that the only future for Linux is to define a single, unified, distro (or effectively kill the distro idea outright).
Systemd is one battle in that war, Gnome and offshot projects (like XDG-app/Flatpak) is another.
there is a simple out out there, islinuxaboutchoice, the domain registered to a prominent and outspoken Gnome dev, that links to an email on the Fedora mailing list, penned by Adam Jackson (Ajax). Both the site and the email is fervently against the idea that Linux is about choice.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:09PM (1 child)
EXACTLY. The Wayland developers told us all a BIG FAT LIE a few years ago when they claimed X wasn't network transparent either. Ever since then, they've been trying to claim it wasn't REALLY a lie, just a humongous exaggeration. TFA is just the latest example of that.
Dear Wayland developers, unless and until Wayland INTRINSICALLY supports seamless operation over the network at least as well as X does (and I don't mean silly tricks like "well you can run an X server as a Wayland client and then if the Wayland app also happens to support X, it will work"), Wayland will remain unfit for purpose. Kindly pull your heads out of your asses.
The lying tells us they know there is demand for the capability. Otherwise, why lie about having it or the competition not having it? If they just don't want to do it, fine. Just shut the Wayland project down and go home. But if they ACTUALLY want to replace X, time to get to work and make it a proper replacement for X.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:34AM
Yeah the problem is not with X, it is with the various software devs that decide to go with the Windows/MacOS way of things and assume that all X installs will be local. Thus they pass around raw bitmaps and write code that talk directly to the GPU.
Never mind that X has long provided extensions that allows for all this to be done over a network, but they get ignored because it may produce a frame or two less compared to something running on Windows on the same hardware.