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Chris Siebenmann, a UNIX herder at the University of Toronto CS Lab, asserts that the death watch for the X Window System (aka X11) has probably started:
I was recently reading Christian F.K. Schaller's On the Road to Fedora Workstation 31 (via both Fedora Planet and Planet Gnome). In it, Schaller says in one section (about Gnome and their move to fully work on Wayland):
Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is.
X11, for all its advantages, also has several incurable design flaws relating to security. However, the major distros have not yet been in any hurry to replace it. Wayland is touted as the next step in graphical interfaces. What are Soylentils thoughts on Wayland or the demise of X11?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Thursday July 04 2019, @08:42PM (7 children)
Does VNC allow you to just run one program or do you have to run the whole desktop metaphor and run whatever you want inside that? When I'm running a gui program remotely, I typically just want to run that one program, usually along side some things I'm doing in the terminal window I used to SSH there. I don't need a whole desktop metaphor running inside my immediate desktop metaphor.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:05PM (3 children)
I feel like an outsider here still using headless servers and CLI. I've yet to truly need a window manager, X, Wayland, or VNC on any server.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Thursday July 04 2019, @09:25PM
For me, it isn't so much "need" as convenience. Some things are easier in a GUI and some things are harder. I've had occasion (rarely) to run GIMP over SSH -- certainly quicker and easier to get the right custom crop on a single image than using imagemagick CLI tools. By the same token, doing a mass change to an entire directory of images is way better on the CLI.
On a frequent basis, I end up using a GUI text editor because I find those more convenient than CLI text editors when I'm dealing with more than one screen of text and especially when dealing with multiple files open at the same time. One file and relatively short though? I'll just use nano. I can, with some annoyance, use vi. I don't know emacs and never had the motivation to learn.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @04:41AM
I have a use-case: remove visualisation of large data sets.
The only reasonable use-case for a remote window system involves a use-case where you can't transfer the required data (in which case you can use local tools).
For me that's only true when I want to make a movie from terabyte-sized datasets that exist on a cluster somewhere.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bot on Friday July 05 2019, @05:30AM
Did you ever need to get a file on the server that is blocked as a direct download, so that even using wget with all the session data and cookies and certs fails? the only way is to run the browser on the server, get to the download and save. Last time i tried a curses browser for some web2.0 sites, it wasn't pretty.
opening a full desktop session and vnc is hugely impractical, especially since in most VPS the ram is not to be wasted.
This guy basically said: we want x11 to die by induced bitrot (we have the tools nudge nudge wink wink), so that our solution gets mainstream.
If you remove x11 expect compatibility problems till 2038.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:39PM (1 child)
however the program has to properly grab context on its own, otherwise you need at least a minimalist window manager to help handle it.
That said: I have used X and vnc in non-interactive modes for decades when I just needed something displayed on a second screen, and xinerama/multimode/etc wasn't available.
In fact the only downside to X so far has been due to no serious support for networked gl transmission to run 3d apps remotely. Since it needs the state in the GPU, VNC works out best for viewing those apps remotely.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @06:02PM
Crazy thing is that the first OpenGL implementation was indirect, meaning that he OpenGL instructions could be streamed across a network to a local GPU.
But apparently it was not giving people enough frames per second so the current scheme was adopted.
And they have the balls to claim that because of this, X is no longer network transparent.
NO, the protocol is still network transparent.
But the programs implemented in GTK and Qt these days are not because they insist on yakking directly to the GPU via Linux-specific DRI calls.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 04 2019, @11:35PM
I've never tried - my use case pretty much demands full desktop access, but I believe VNC protocol would allow you to just share a single window if that's how you want to configure the server, and the client would be none-the-wiser.
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