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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:54AM (4 children)
Maybe 'ported' apps using a shitty toolkit are of questionable utility over the network, but I have plenty of X apps that run perfectly well over the network and transparently. Hell, NASA and SGI both released a whole pile of network monitoring tools a decade ago whose primary purpose was providing real time feedback from remote computers to client windows on centralized X servers. But bear in mind most of these apps used native X widgets and not simply bitmapped crap under gtk or qt.
Really the solution to X's shortcomings today isn't a system like wayland, but rather a return of the DPS (Display PostScript) servers, now that technology has improved to the point where the gpu could transparently and in real time decode the display postscript content, scaling it to match screen resolution and DPI, and providing the wsywig feedback needed for the widgets to interact with the cursor(s) or touch display events without issues due to trying to calculate fast enough to work out what pixel and most-foreground widget intersect (which if I am remembering correctly was the major crux of some of that UI design methodology.)
Today however it is almost ludicrious to in-app bitmapping going on which just results in excessive memory usage in the app which could instead be pushed to the gpu, and even there limited to time spent rendering to the display, or an indirect buffer being displayed or otherwise output.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Unixnut on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:00PM (1 child)
Yeah I was going to post the same thing, but you did a good enough job.
Been using X for more than a decade, even remotely across the internet. I found that it works great. Using SSH and X forwarding, the fact I can run a program on a server across the world and have it show up seamlessly integrated into my desktop is really something.
Over a high speed link (or LAN) it is transparent to the point that I don't even know if the program I am interacting with is running on my machine or not, which is the holy grail of remote display protocols. It even integrates the clipboards, so I can copy/paste and drag and drop seamlessly.
Even full X terminal sessions work great, and for a long time (back before "Silent PCs" were a thing) I would shove my big, multidisk, noisy workstation up in the attic, where I can't hear it, and use a thin terminal at my desk via a 100mbit network, and it worked great.
As this was in the days of OSS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_System) and we didn't have pulseAudio, I used Esound (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_Sound_Daemon) to transport the audio over the network to my thin client).
You could even watch videos over X, and while not as good as local, it was much better than I expected it would be if I am honest. I wouldn't use it as a home cinema system, but for casual viewing it was fine.
The only thing I've would say would be nice is:
- Ability to resume full remote Xsessions when disconnected. Normally when you disconnect your session is shut down, and you have to relogin. Xrdp/Sesman kind of handles this nowadays, but it isn't fully developed/integrated last time I checked. Losing everything because of a network glitch is a PITA.
- Ability to forward USB (so for example, I plug a USB key into the terminal, its data can be accessed on the remote session). This would probably fit better under its own server/client daemon rather than be shoved into X. Maybe some more generic sharing protocol. You can kinda script this together with NFS, remote mounts, etc... but it could do with refinement and usability improvements.
I suspect the people who go on about X being a failure are those who value "eyecandy" over functionality. If you are rending full bitmaps in your graphics toolkit in order to do all kinds of fancy effects and animations (to the point where you need 3D graphics acceleration just for your window manager), I can believe that remote X would be a pile of shit.
At best, it will work about as well as VNC (which was designed to do nothing but shove bitmaps across) at which point they will say the protocol is a bloated mess because 90% of the features are not used. At worst it will be dog slow, high latency, and generally a poor experience compared to VNC, so they will say X is a failure.
X is a shit protocol to transport bitmaps across, there are actual protocols that work that way (such as VNC), which is probably why to them VNC makes sense. That doesn't mean that X is a failure, any more than complaining a hammer is a failure because you can't spread butter on your toast properly with it.
Different tools for different tasks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:04PM
Xpra does some of what you're asking for (persistence, usb forwarding, sound etc.)
It's a bit of a hack, and it's not really X forwarding, but it feels like X forwarding.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Burz on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:23PM (1 child)
Please... spare us the primitivism.
Every time I see anecdotes from Unix techies griping about "bitmapped crap" and calling for a return to the old days (yeah, the 1980s) I'm reminded of the excellent developments in _usable_ network transparency that Apple and Microsoft did in the early 2000s. On the heels of that work came applications allowing ordinary users to do things like _share_ windows and desktops in a conference mode.
There is nothing X-related that approaches that level of functionality (the "first-class environment" OP article refers to) save for the work done on the NX protocol, which none of the commenters here even appear to remember. NX was the only over-Internet extension of X that made nearly as good as Apple and MS network transparency in terms of speed and features.
So the FOSS GUI field ignored a whole generation of graphics development because it already had a mostly-unusable (to regular people) version of network transparency from the 1980s. They said "we already have that" and remained ignorant. And they still plod onward, wondering why people don't prefer Linux desktops where they can do their conferencing in a nice Windows 10 virtual machine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:38PM
please, spare us the dumbing down of everything, we are already getting to idiocracy levels and bs like this just doesn't help