Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe-Y-will-be-better dept.

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:26PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:26PM (#636019)

    As we're throwing in anecdotes... "ssh -X" (or "ssh -Y") works fantastically well for most all the apps I try

    In the spirit of anecdotes this following apps work beautifully:

    mythtv-setup (the crazy GUI is the only way to set up mythtv)

    emacs (frigging beautiful)

    octave's GUI IDE thing (although honestly I mostly have finger muscle memory now to type octave --no-win)

    GNU-R's GUI IDE

    The following apps that I use which don't work via X network transparency:

    (blank space here)

    Admittedly I've been spending a possibly unhealthy amount of time using rdesktop and VNC into entire hosted vmware cluster environments but I do occasionally forward simple apps using X and its always worked pretty well.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Informative=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:54PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:54PM (#636051)

    Yeah, I'm with you. I'm not crazy about the speed sometimes, but almost everything I've ever needed to run over tunnelled X has worked. There have been a couple with problems, but not inconvenient enough that I even remember what they were. I'd like to see a better solution eventually (not sure if Wayland is it), but not something like the the architectural horror that is systemd. It really does seem there's a systematic attack on Linux going on these days.

  • (Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:16PM

    by digitalaudiorock (688) on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:16PM (#636105) Journal

    In the spirit of anecdotes this following apps work beautifully:

    mythtv-setup (the crazy GUI is the only way to set up mythtv)

    Yup...I do this all the time. This shit has just plain worked for it's intended purposes just about forever, yet suddenly now, in the days of gigabit LANs and 200 Mbps Internet, the Wayland fanboys want us to believe that it's too slow to be viable or some such crap? Talk about FUD. There seem to be a lot of know-it-alls destroying open source software these days. I'll no sooner use Wayland than systemd.