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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: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:09PM (1 child)

    by sjames (2882) on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:09PM (#636055) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:34AM (#637997)

    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.