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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


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  • (Score: 1) by Burz on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:41PM (1 child)

    by Burz (6156) on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:41PM (#636044)

    Most people don't care about using a Firefox instance sitting on a remote computer. Many of them _do_ want an efficient way to _share_ their own windows and sessions via Internet conferencing. X doesn't allow for this, and VNC is too primitive/inefficient. Windows and OS X proprietary protocols have this ability, which is an important (though seldom-cited) reason why FOSS systems can't make it on the desktop (as in: you can't even give this stuff away for free). We have paid dearly for clinging to 1980s technology.

  • (Score: 1) by Burz on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:12PM

    by Burz (6156) on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:12PM (#636057)

    I'd also like to point out the irony of wanting to use one remote-display protocol to render another, newer one (HTML); meaning this is a corner-case at best.