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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, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:30AM (5 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:30AM (#635938) Homepage

    Sounds like Jews are trying to co-opt nerds into SystemD-like display protocols.

    Jews == CIA. Maybe we can get rid of those columns, and replace them with people who know how to build.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Chromium_One on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:45AM (3 children)

      by Chromium_One (4574) on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:45AM (#635941)

      Didn't you used to have some standards? Like, this is crapflooding, not trolling.

      --
      When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:51AM

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:51AM (#635943) Homepage

        I never had standards. From fat bitches, to liturgical gold, to trash. And mostly fat bitches. Now you can eat my shit, open wide!

      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:56AM (1 child)

        by Bot (3902) on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:56AM (#635945) Journal

        Yeah, I mean, capitalizing "jews", come on.
        (this post brought by AI getting data from the interwebs)

        --
        Account abandoned.
        • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:38AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:38AM (#635962)

          Here it is; it's ready for you! My rancid, feces-filled rectum, that is. My foul anus is leaking out nasty anal mucus in anticipation for your fetid cock! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, I just sucked your disgusting cock right into my snap, and there's nothing you can do about it. Let's get this feces fiesta started, shall we!? What say you?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:06PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:06PM (#636054)

      Stupid people say stupid things. Shocking but true based on evidence.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Chromium_One on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:41AM (1 child)

    by Chromium_One (4574) on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:41AM (#635940)

    Raw X over network? FUCK NO. Like the slideshow says it'll either bottleneck and do the stupid, or fail as an app tries to do something that's not covered in network protocol.

    My own answer is Xvnc (tigervnc, specifically) or x2go. Works until you need hardware acceleration, like, oh, lots of games do. Occasional hiccup with specific browser and website combos (Hey, gmaps under which browsers crashes again because it tries to hardware accelerate drawing of map data layers?) but usually seamless for my normal usage.

    --
    When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:53PM

      by frojack (1554) on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:53PM (#636099) Journal

      Plus 1 for Tigervnc.

      However, on Gigabit ethernet, you could run most desktops IN HOUSE on X-networking (gnome kde xfce), especially if you turned on compression. I don't routinely see any problems due to faulty or missing network protocol.

      X is just bandwidth heavy. Its network layer shim is at the wrong place in the sofware stack. Citrix has the same design flaw.

      I've found that x over the network is somewhat usable on 100meg, and quite serviceable on 1000meg. Just make sure every switch and cable between you and the other end it Gigabit capable, which generally amounts to nothing over the internet.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:47AM (15 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:47AM (#635942)

    Propaganda "solutions" to technical problems are a thing these days

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:12AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:12AM (#635946)

      Be fair, wayland is going somewhere....

      X networking is fine for xeyes, if there was :
      1. a list of the subset of programs commonly available on unix systems that work via Xs' network transparency; or
      2. a list of the subset of programs that don't and why

      it may get more credit.

      I know I want it, just never got it to do anything useful at a usable speed.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:20AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:20AM (#637988)

        Anything that use the GPU to accelerate something is likely to cause you problems, because those invariably bypass X to talk directly to the hardware for some blinkered reason.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by KiloByte on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:25AM (3 children)

      by KiloByte (375) on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:25AM (#635949)

      This. X works fine for me, including network transparency. Wayland does not.

      --
      Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:56PM (2 children)

        by frojack (1554) on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:56PM (#636100) Journal

        Is network transparency even planned for Wayland? (Honest question, because I don't know).

        Wayland devs have already admitted they are no better than X at security, and won't let you run root Graphical apps as joe user.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @01:01AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @01:01AM (#636192)

          Wayland is going to use Microsoft RDP. Rough quote from a wayland dev about using RDP was, "...a case where worse is better."

          For the very rare case that I need to use a remote gui application, X forwarding has worked fine for me.

          Some of what I have read about wayland worries me that we are in store for systemd experience redux-- e.g., devs hostile to server-side WM decorations. But, I'm reserving judgment for now.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:23AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:23AM (#637991)

            And that quite reminded me of some old unix text that compared MIT with some other university, and claimed that MIT often got stuck trying to find perfect solutions and thus never getting anything out the door.

            And it may well seem that with the relative success of the Linux ecosystem, the MIT mentality of perfection has set in, and the likes of Wayland (and perhaps also systemd) is the result.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:29PM (6 children)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:29PM (#636021)

      New strategy of entryism then destruction is the new meme replacing the old "embrace extend extinguish"

      Next up for the entryists to destroy will be SSH, CRON, shell scripting as a technology.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:07PM (5 children)

        by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:07PM (#636025) Journal

        Next up for the entryists to destroy will be SSH, CRON, shell scripting as a technology.

        M$ has forked OpenSSH and has been using it to attack the original project upstream. Cron is threatened by Red Hat's systemd. (Red Hat now has way too many "former" M$ staff, especially at the higher levels, though Poettering himself is probably somewhat independent from that.) And M$ has also set its sights on the shell, eventually they will be in a position to attack it full on, but so far that has only manifested as a gimmick called PowerShell. Prior to that M$ was content to get people to disparage the shell and get them to parrot about the "command line" being difficult and old-fashioned. Regular people are finding out that it's neither, so M$ had to change tactics and PowerShell is part of that new attack.

        --
        Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
        • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:32PM (2 children)

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:32PM (#636066) Journal

          Technological solutions don't exist to moral problems like this. In the end they may destroy F/OSS entirely just because they can, they have money, and people will let them. I despair sometimes...

          --
          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
          • (Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:55PM (1 child)

            by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:55PM (#636076) Journal

            In the end they may destroy F/OSS entirely just because they can, they have money, and people will let them. I despair sometimes...

            Because they can. That's been the M$ modus operandi for decades and it still is how they work. Each and every time they have ever gotten in a position to harm other projects or businesses, they go full out to do so, even if it puts them at a disadvantage for doing so. They prefer to kill the other businesses and projects when the chance arises and they can. They have always done so enitrely just because they can. Examples are buried in some of the court records published on Groklaw's archive which contains all kinds of stuff including EEE [groklaw.net]. However, in regular news archives there are plenty of examples dead business partners that somehow thought they would be the first company ever to survive a partnership with M$.

            The part about people letting them do so is IMHO the real problem. Canonical, for example, could have gone far if they had not gone out of their way to alienate the FOSS community by allowing M$ entryism via Mono and co. That was followed up by bringing in loads of "former" M$ staff to stock key positions. Then came systemd ...

            If you despair only sometimes then, relatively speaking, you are quite the optimist.

            --
            Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:29AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:29AM (#637995)

              Funny you should mention Mono, because one of the big names behind mono is also the instigator of Gnome, and seems to always having harbored a lust of the Microsoft ecosystem...

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @06:06AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @06:06AM (#636279)

          > (Red Hat now has way too many "former" M$ staff, especially at the higher levels, though Poettering himself is probably somewhat independent from that.)

          So the only person that could actually be *improved* from MS influence is the independent one? Figures.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @12:40AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @12:40AM (#637371)

          Poettering, and quite a few fellow RH employees (in particular those working on Fedora as a side show), think that the only future for Linux is to define a single, unified, distro (or effectively kill the distro idea outright).

          Systemd is one battle in that war, Gnome and offshot projects (like XDG-app/Flatpak) is another.

          there is a simple out out there, islinuxaboutchoice, the domain registered to a prominent and outspoken Gnome dev, that links to an email on the Fedora mailing list, penned by Adam Jackson (Ajax). Both the site and the email is fervently against the idea that Linux is about choice.

    • (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.

      • (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.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:53AM (24 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:53AM (#635944) Journal

    A. X network transparency is a failure
    B. study about X network transparency is a failure

    personally, given that remote X apps (over LAN but also over servers on this side of the ocean) are very practical for some purposes, and for the others there is x11vnc which shares the current session, and given that sdl games are fluid enough, I can't really say A. Which leaves, um...

    --
    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:35AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:35AM (#635950)

      Correct. I've used X11 over network or tunneled over SSH a lot in the last ~20 odd years. Even GLX worked just fine for what it was doing (though that's not something I've tried recently).

      • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:21PM (2 children)

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:21PM (#636034) Journal

        Why? I mean, sure, it can be cool to see an X based app running remotely, but there are a lot of text screen based resources, like, oh, the "screen" utility, and wget and links for some web work, rsync, and bash, and well, every utility in sbin really. Do not need X for system administration, remote or local. As for X terminals, computers are so cheap now I don't see the point of bothering with a dumb terminal, not when you can smarten it up by employing a $5 Raspberry Pi with the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, each of which likely costs more than the computer. Having a kind of KVM could be a reason, but that too is suspect. It's hard for one person to effectively utilize several GUIs. Maybe for visualizing proteins as you're folding them, or for playing several characters at the same time in the same MMORPG or FPS, but that latter is just easier with several complete computers.

        I used X tunneled through ssh only once, to remotely run Wireshark (just before the name change from Ethereal), to diagnose some network issues with a VoIP app on a remote machine, and that only because I didn't bother checking into whether Ethereal had a text based interface (seems like it should), while all the tools for X tunneling were already set up. Needed packet sniffing at both ends to figure out what was going on.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:36PM

          by sjames (2882) on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:36PM (#636041) Journal

          I prefer text based administration, but there are too many corner cases such as installers that don't offer text as an option (for some stupid reason), browser apps that don't work in text AND insist on connecting to a randomized port so you can't open an ssh tunnel in advance, etc that it's better to just use X over an ssh tunnel.

          In my home setup, I have a desktop machine that's nice and quiet and I have a 2U server that sounds a bit like a shop-vac when it gets busy. So I put it in another room and use X over the network for CPU intensive work that wants a graphical display.

        • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:18PM

          by frojack (1554) on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:18PM (#636107) Journal

          Why? I mean, sure, it can be cool to see an X based app running remotely, but there are a lot of text screen based resources, like, oh, the "screen" utility, and wget and links for some web work, rsync, and bash, and well,

          Why? Because there are some applications where its necessary to have graphical outputs, and the quickest path is X over a sufficiently fast network.

          Rather than rewriting each application to send data over a socket and then write a client to graphically display that shit, (a custom one off job for each application needing remote display) which can take man-years to build, just use the tools at hand. X over the network.

          Its easier to get gigabit ethernet end-to-end (across the campus or across the ocean) than it is to rewrite applications.

          Sure, starting from scratch you can build that data-shipping-to-client into the each new app. Its easy, because there are so many standards to choose from, right? /snort. No matter which you pick it will be wrong.

          (We've done this in my day job, and found we could hang the tcp-stack between the software and the display generation, but that required a client, and it also meant we had to design our own transmission protocol, and we had to encrypt stuff in both directions. But we had the requirement up front, and full control of the data-to-screen stack. We weren't trying to retrofit it into someone's existing steaming pile of agile crap.)

          The real world does not revolve around a collection of command line utilities, and wget and links for "web work". And the real world has to be multi platform.

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @12:51AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @12:51AM (#637379)

        GLX seems to be the pain point they use when claiming X is not network transparent.

        But what they do not state is that GLX used to be network transparent, but that was discarded in trying to eek out those last few frames pr second and finally entice game companies to support Linux.

        Didn't happen, because in doing so they just demonstrated that they can't be assed to maintain API compatiblity across versions like Microsoft can (old directx games work without a patch on Windows 10 more often than not).

        And now we have the whole compositor DE eyecandy boondongle going on, that is feeding directly into Wayland hype.

        This under the pretext that X11 can't produce frames without tearing, except that every damn person that complains about that is running Nvidia proprietary drivers with vsync disabled!

        In effect what is going on is JWZ's CADT on an epic scale. And the day Linus hands over the reins of the kernel to GKH, is the day that CADT reach the kernel. And that day is the day Linux dies a slow, painful death.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:54AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:54AM (#635952)

      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)

        by Unixnut (5779) on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:00PM (#635974)

        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

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:04PM (#636012)

          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)

        by Burz (6156) on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:23PM (#636035)

        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

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:38PM (#636043)

          please, spare us the dumbing down of everything, we are already getting to idiocracy levels and bs like this just doesn't help

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by tonyPick on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:12AM (5 children)

      by tonyPick (1237) on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:12AM (#635957) Homepage Journal

      As we're throwing in anecdotes... "ssh -X" (or "ssh -Y") works fantastically well for most all the apps I try, (with the notable exception of QtCreator. Damn you QtCreator.).

      Hell, I'm not even 100% certain which machine_this_ Firefox session is running on. Over a LAN it's seamless, and I've run over a crappy old modem then onto a machine across the Atlantic, and had key X apps (terminals, editors) viable enough to work with on the remote side directly. It sure as hell beat waking finding somebody from the UK office awake at 2 in the morning to run the things locally.

      IMO: In a world of containers, virtual machines, and distributed devices across multiple physical hardware items on links of varying capacity then remote X, with minimal network traffic, is becoming more relevant and more important, not less. The most common reason for not using it I've ever heard is "I didn't know it could do that".

      • (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.

        • (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.

      • (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.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:21PM (6 children)

      by TheRaven (270) on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:21PM (#635976) Journal

      The problem with X's network transparency was that they put it at the wrong layer and so it sucked for a long time. The X protocol is entirely asynchronous, so you can batch up a bunch of commands and hide latency, but XLib exposed synchronous APIs, so you ended up with one network round trip for each line you drew. This got worse when applications moved the rendering to local buffers and used the display server to just draw them on the screen (which you needed for things like antialiased text and for sane font handling). Then things got a bit better with the trio of damage, render, and composite extensions, where you could render an image locally, transfer it to the server, have the server composite it, and only update parts that had changed.

      In contrast, Sun's NeWS system, which competed with X early on, put the network at the controller layer in the MVC model. The display server had code sent to it, not just data, so your display server knew, for example, that something was a button and to animate it when it was clicked, while simultaneously sending a button-clicked event across the network to the application.

      These days, the web browser is increasingly becoming a modern version of NeWS. You can send it textures, fonts, and code for drawing UIs and with WebSocket you can get low-latency asynchronous events. If I were designing a new display server, I'd think about using a NeWS-like model with WebAssembly replacing PostScript as the language for server-side interpreted code, but still expose a PostScript drawing model and OpenGL, so that it could be implemented both as a native display server and in a web browser with the canvas tag and WebGL.

      --
      sudo mod me up
      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:39PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:39PM (#635979)

        If I were designing a new display server, I'd think about using a NeWS-like model with WebAssembly replacing PostScript

        Good thing you are not, then. As if we need MORE attack surface for virii and trojans to exploit.

        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:12PM (2 children)

          by TheRaven (270) on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:12PM (#636080) Journal

          Right, because that's a much lower attack surface than X already has, where any code that runs as the current user can intercept all events and can run any arbitrary code on the GPU and can snoop on the contents of all existing windows.

          You basically have two choices: run code on the display server, or accept that remote display is going to suck on any network with nontrivial latency.

          --
          sudo mod me up
          • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:36PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:36PM (#636092)

            https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/Security/ [x.org]
            And never assume that if you do not know about something, no one else does.

            • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:40AM

              by TheRaven (270) on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:40AM (#636326) Journal
              Nothing in that link contradicts what I said. The authentication mechanisms (including Kerberos) let any process that can read files owned by the user connect. The SECURITY extension has so many caveats that it's effectively nonexistent. Anything that is allowed to use the GLX extension can still run code on your GPU which can snoop on the contents of all other windows.
              --
              sudo mod me up
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:30AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:30AM (#636273)

        Years ago someone created a new C async binding, XCB, a more direct link to the X Protocol. XLib was partialy reimplemented with it to improve things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCB [wikipedia.org]

        But we keep getting huge toolkits that going dumber and dumber, for the great shiny and the mobile experience (yeah, in your desktop or laptop). I remember when Alan Cox discovered GNOME was really slow due to fonts, because the apps where looking for the files (instead of... I don't know, create a new font system in X11, with aliasing and proper compositing, including proper gamma correction... we got fontconfig & freetype, which assume fixed gamma and B&W colors) and doing it over and over. His home machines used NFS, so multiple file requests (for nothing in the end) slowed everything. Also I remember when one app was found recalcing own widget layout thousands of times per second, instead of a more sane 100... after all the user will not see more than the monitor refresh (anything above 200FPS would be stupid).

        • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:45AM

          by TheRaven (270) on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:45AM (#636327) Journal

          XCB was a huge improvement. I've written code that used it, and the model is pretty nice. You can fit it into an actor-model programming environment and defer waiting for the acks for a long time. Having XLib implemented on top of XCB simplified the XLib code a lot, but didn't really help anything using XLib, because you're still using a synchronous API on top, so the XLib APIs end up doing an async call and then blocking on the result. I don't know what the status of other toolkits moving to XCB is, but it had the potential for a lot of improvements.

          The problem for X font handling was somewhat inherent in the client-server design. If you want to support fairly dumb X terminals running an X server and nothing else, then you don't want to put font handling there because installing a new font means adding the font to the terminal (which may not even have writeable storage). The XRender extension actually has a pretty sensible way of dealing with fonts. The client renders each glyph into a texture and transfers it to the server, the server can then composite the glyphs into the correct place. This is exactly the same model that Quartz uses on OS X. That said, most things using Cairo don't actually use XRENDER this way, they instead render in software on the client and send the resulting image to the server. At least if they use XDAMAGE they're not sending an entire window contents every time a cursor blinks though...

          --
          sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Whoever on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:11PM

      by Whoever (4524) on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:11PM (#636056) Journal

      Let's not forget that the original plan was that Wayland would NOT have network transparency. It was only the outrage of Linux users that changed it.

      This seems to be a weak justification for that original position, based on the fact that network transparency in X has some limitations.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:40AM (#635951)

    Nowhere in TFS does it expand "X" into "The X Window System"[1], but that's what this is about (the graphics server commonly used with UNIX-like OSes).

    Wayland and Mir are partially-implemented alternatives.

    [1] ...sometimes shortened to X Window (but never to X Windows--except by dim bulbs), and as demonstrated here, sometimes simply to X.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Entropy on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:59AM (5 children)

    by Entropy (4228) on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:59AM (#635953)

    The RAID guy over ssh just fine, a web browser just fine, and well darn near anything else I've been tempted to run just fine. No, I don't run a video game or something over it and expect that to work--but it does a pretty amazing job for everything I've run on it.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by KiloByte on Saturday February 10 2018, @11:25AM (4 children)

      by KiloByte (375) on Saturday February 10 2018, @11:25AM (#635972)

      In the previous millenium, we played Quake from four IRIX boxen ssh-ing into a single Linux server. With the default window size (320x240), the window was pretty small but framerate quite playable. I imagine that two decades later, there shouldn't be any issues with sending fully rendered frames over the network.

      --
      Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:13PM (2 children)

        by TheRaven (270) on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:13PM (#635975) Journal
        OpenGL was always designed to be network transparent, and this ended up being a big advantage with modern GPUs. The API layering meant that you always treated the thing doing the acceleration as potentially being remote, so you'd do things like send it textures, send it geometry, and then tell it to render a frame from a specific viewpoint. This model works well with a GPU, because you want to copy the everything to GPU video memory once and never bring any of it back. Several competing APIs at the time assumed that it was fine to keep things in host memory and refer to them by pointer.

        Once X.org gained AIGLX support (proprietary X servers from companies like Sun and SGI had supported it for ages), it became quite feasible to run GLQuake over a LAN with little latency. The textures were all cached on the display server (client in not-X terminology) and rendered there.

        --
        sudo mod me up
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:43PM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:43PM (#635981) Journal

          on the display server (client in not-X terminology) and rendered there.

          Wrong. It is the client only in the terminology of the clueless. You do not really want to tell me that my terminal window, my browser, and any other graphical program are servers that are contacted by the X client in order to provide the service "give me something to show", do you? No, it is all those graphical programs that contact the X display server which is the one managing the resource (the display).

          Remember: "Server" does not refer to where the machine running the code sits (and BTW, for X in many cases both the server and the client run on the same machine anyway). It refers to which program provides a service (in this case, access to the display), and which program requests its services (in this case, the GUI applications).

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
        • (Score: 2) by KiloByte on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:59PM

          by KiloByte (375) on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:59PM (#636341)

          It was before GLquake, so pure software rendering only. You're right about OpenGL, though.

          --
          Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Saturday February 10 2018, @02:38PM

        by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 10 2018, @02:38PM (#636006) Journal

        There's a cool thing called VirtualGL [virtualgl.org] nowadays that lets you render on remote GPUs and display on your local workstation (or any other on the network). It's a bit fiddly to set up but it works really well. It's very handy if you have a farm of shared workstations with GPUs to share.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:29PM (1 child)

    by Arik (4543) on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:29PM (#636038) Journal
    It's a bit rambly, he really doesn't say anything till paragraph 4 "it's clear that it's been years since X could deliver a real first class environment over the network." But what does he mean by 'real first class environment?' Ramble ramble ramble, ah, I see. He wants to run the video on the remote machine and display it locally? :facedesk: How on earth could that even make sense? Just use a local player for that. So the first real complaint is a classic example of missing the point. It's like you said "I tried to comb my hair with a shovel and I dang near cut my head off, and it did my hair no good either! These things are no good, they fail to do the job."

    So, his main complaint is a colossal example of missing the point, he's blaming X for the reality of where the hardware is and how those things work. If we had thin clients with simple framebuffers attached to huge fast network pipes and super-server machines in a datacenter somewhere (as many imagined we would, back when X was being developed) with all the specialized circuitry, RAM, I/O etc. you could dream of, then it would make perfect sense for them to decode videos and then send them to the thin-client as bitmaps. But that's not how the hardware has developed so it doesn't make sense. It has nothing at all to do with X transparency either way, it's all about where the various circuits sit on the network, and how fast and responsive that network can be.

    The typical suggestion to 'solve' this problem where it is not (in X) typically amounts to adding yet another layer of encode-decode to the process, needlessly complicating it. Again, when you have lots of resources locally and a slow unresponsive network you decode locally, and the simple, straightforward way to do this is just to run the danged video player locally.

    This is not the only complaint he has, though. Let's continue.

    "The second is that the communication facilities that X provided were too narrow and limited. This forced people to go outside of them in order to do all sorts of things, starting with audio and moving on to things like DBus and other ways of coordinating environments, handling sophisticated configuration systems, modern fonts, and so on."

    "Sophisticated configuration systems" is a link, let's follow it and see exactly what he's talking about.

    "Remote applications and Gnome settings: an irritation" ( https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/RemoteAppsGconf )

    You can go read it yourself if you doubt me, but he's unironically blaming X for the fact that Gnome insisted on inventing their own deliberately obtuse and incompatible way of handling settings, which doesn't play well with others (or even alone.) If I was writing fiction I would hesitate to include this, it would be too absurd, but like I said, check the link if you doubt me.

    "Modern fonts" is also a link. Oh goody. ( https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ModernXFontDrawback )

    Again, it's difficult to see how this can fairly be labeled a failure of X transparency so much as a failure to reign in font-madness in general. It's absolutely ludicrous to see how many fonts a default install of even a relatively sane OS contains. Many of them not even legible. A screen font on a general purpose PC has one job and one job only! To be clear and unambiguous, to facilitate error-free reading of text on that screen.

    A multitude of fonts are not helpful here. The only time I could see an argument for even installing most of this junk is if the machine is specifically being used for a print shop. Which very, very few are.

    But no, we need 20 bazillion different fonts on every machine because lord forbid a web browser be forced to ignore an *optional* font instruction when rendering a web-page.

    I'll stop now before I get too rambly myself.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 1) by Burz on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:53PM

      by Burz (6156) on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:53PM (#636049)

      He wants to run the video on the remote machine and display it locally? :facedesk: How on earth could that even make sense? Just use a local player for that.

      What?! You want to make the user coordinate multiple tools when the application / use case calls for video in the app? You want to prevent the app author from creating an integrated presentation? Sending a pre-compressed stream to the client isn't an option? HA. That's why people can't conference effectively on an X11 based machine.

      As for "font madness", it only seems that way because you use an OS lacking a well-defined set of core fonts.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:56PM (5 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:56PM (#636052) Journal

    I understand the idea the designers of X had. I understand why they picked the terminology. But it still would have been reasonable to call an X application program the "server" of X images, window content and information, and call the display the "client" of that information.

    Even most non-technical people understand the terms client / server. With file servers. With database servers. With web servers. And this was mostly true even in 1990. To some extent even in the 1980's.

    The other thing I think (IMO) was a mistake was the idea that an X display server could display windows from multiple "client" computers. Yeah, it's cool that a workstation could show several windows with information provided by several different remote computers. But that could fit within the framework of "remote desktop login".

    X ignores what was happening with the Mac (classic), Windows, and even other desktop like environments (eg, Amiga). Even unix workstations provided desktop environments. The whole idea of a remote desktop login, virtualized within a single window is very valuable. I could have a login account on a remote machine, and just like "telnet", I could "remote desktop" in to that other machine and have a complete virtualized desktop in a window at my workstation.

    Amusingly, what I describe in the previous paragraph is how everything works today. VNC and RDP are the common remote GUI protocols.

    One area where Linux appears to still lag behind Microsoft RDP is that "logging in" is not part of the desktop session or protocol.

    Of course, one thing that is easy to forget, is that computers were way, way less powerful with far less resources than even the cheapest computers of today.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Entropy on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:38PM (2 children)

      by Entropy (4228) on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:38PM (#636068)

      That was not a mistake at all. Most of the time I only want a window from a remote server--not some bloated desktop environment garbage. There are absolutely TONS of times people need to run a single program, and ssh -X does the best job I've ever seen for that. I also like my remote windows to integrate with my desktop environment, not try to impose their own garbage on my machine for a single program.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:22PM (1 child)

        by digitalaudiorock (688) on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:22PM (#636108) Journal

        That was not a mistake at all. Most of the time I only want a window from a remote server--not some bloated desktop environment garbage.

        This! Open source seems to be hellbent on replacing everything with shit that emulates the Windows approach to everything. The last fucking thing I want is the likes of RDP when I can can run a GUI on a headless server with no graphical server at all, simply by having the appropriate X libraries installed. Simple just isn't fashionable these days apparently.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:15PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:15PM (#636338)

          But the RDP protocol can do application-level forwarding (which is partly why it was renamed Terminal Services in 2008). It is exactly this capability that was used to provide the "XP-mode" backwards compatibility of W7: on the background, it ran a WinXP VM and used application-level forwarding to present that application on your Win7 desktop.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by sjames on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:41PM (1 child)

      by sjames (2882) on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:41PM (#636069) Journal

      Even most non-technical people understand the terms client / server.

      Apparently not. The client program wants the server to provide a display to the user.

      Remote desktop doesn't even begin to approach the usability of seamless integration like X provides. I don't want to see a whole desktop from the other machine, I want to see a single app. I want 1 desktop that contains windows from all of the apps I am using together to perform a single task. shouldn't need to care what machine each app is actually running on. I don't even necessarily want to install a full desktop environment on the remote machines. I don't want them to even be accessible using a password, they do public key authentication only.

      Linux can do VNC and RDP just fine when needed.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:20PM (#636085)

        Exactly. I have never wanted to use a remote desktop. I either want a terminal, or a graphical program. SSH handles both, and X makes the process seamless.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:33PM (#636089)

    ...but ssh -X has been incredibly useful the few times I've used it.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:10PM (2 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:10PM (#636113)

    Guys, stop defending X. The world moved on, the assumptions behind X's design have changed and that means it is going away.

    Those assumptions were 2D image prims that were easy to send over the network. Look at old screenshots and it is easy to imagine how practical that was on 10mb ethernet. We can rage about the reality that everybody is doing local font rendering and bitmapping literally everything but it won't change. Then we get GL and the explosion of textures and other crap. Yes GL is network transparent but have you done the math lately? Video cards come with 8GB and rising. The other issues in X could be addressed and solved, the round trip delays, etc. But the math of bandwidth is simply brutal and remorseless. Now compare to doing all rendering on the same machine with the application and sending out a high quality x265 stream of the final product. A video stream takes at most 20mbps for a really high quality full screen full HD with sound. And being a video stream it can suffer lost packets, make use of RTSP and such to make it more robust. And no long delays to fill gigabytes of textures on scene changes.

    What we want is a protocol to get there that allows the things we care about:

    1. Send an individual application window, not whole desktops.

    2. Fully open protocol. Probably want pluggable video codecs so we can use VP9, etc. while the corporate world will insist on X265.

    3. Like X, applications run on the app server without needing to be displayed anywhere but do somehow share access to the GPU and custom video compression hardware.

    4. A standardized way to share local resources from the display side, like storage, misc USB devices, etc. This gets close to crossing streams with virtualization but it is a popular feature and whoever has it will beat all comers who do not.

    Fighting a rear guard defense of X means we aren't going to get a seat at the table and will end up reverse engineering whatever Microsoft, Apple, Google, RedHat and such impose from above.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:09AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:09AM (#636266)

      1. Single windows. Check. Also capable of shadowing full desktops if you want.
      2. GPL/Expat (MIT?)/BSD licensed code and nothing to hide, lots of image/video codecs to pass data around. Check.
      3. Maybe you mean "unlike". Check anyway, you can keep them running or kill them. They think they are using plain X11, then get shown somewhere else (with zoom... HiDPI for old apps for free). Check.
      4. Partial check, it can connect some things like pulseaudio or dbus or printing. And patches for other things (like X11 tablets... I guess full XInput) are welcome. Storage is probably better done via FUSE SSH or plain old NFS.

      What is not there is the will of the powers that be to use all this "old tech" that solves issues now with lots of backwards compability, because they don't control it, or if they do, it means less jobs rewriting everything and creating a huge new mess that needs support contracts.

      We are not getting a seat, that is for granted. You can play their bitch all you want, but they will not give a seat. Just like in the past, and the solution is probably the same: don't bend over, go our own way.

      • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday February 11 2018, @06:23AM

        by jmorris (4844) on Sunday February 11 2018, @06:23AM (#636283)

        Ok, that looks fun. Except the manpage says all software video encoding so only expect VNC level performance. And when I just installed it and tried it locally I "lost" bigtime. Tried "xpra start-desktop" then "xpra attach" and got a black box full of nuthin. So did "xpra exit" and X went bye-bye. It was still there somewhere, music was still playing so the player hadn't lost contact with X, just the screen had went to a text console. Other text consoles didn't have sound, back to tty1 and sound. Weird. A quick drop to single user and back seems to have cleanly stopped and restarted the desktop.

        Playing more, started firefox in a single app mode window since it is one of the examples in the manpage. SLOW, even running on the local machine. Not looking like a contender, at least not on Fedora.

  • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:57PM (2 children)

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:57PM (#636153) Journal

    Is there any interest in an RDP X front end?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @01:17AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @01:17AM (#636197)

      Is there any interest in an RDP X front end?

      Already exists (pretty much since RDP has existed).

      If you mean a back end, that exists too, but is more recent.

    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday February 11 2018, @11:45AM

      by Arik (4543) on Sunday February 11 2018, @11:45AM (#636332) Journal
      Not really. It already exists, it's not widely used, it's not nearly as useful.
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:15PM (#636382)

    X derives its name as a successor to a pre-1983 window system called W (the letter preceding X in the English alphabet).
    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Predecessors [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 1) by gozar on Sunday February 11 2018, @08:35PM

    by gozar (5426) on Sunday February 11 2018, @08:35PM (#636434)

    Back in 2011, we had a bunch of G4 Mac minis in our school district that weren't very useful anymore. 512MB of ram and PPC couldn't get on the internet very well.

    I set up a couple of beefy servers with Linux, and set the G4s to boot up into Linux and ssh into the beefy servers to run the Joe Window manager and Chrome. Here is an example of Flash running remotely on an iBook G4 [youtube.com]. We used this set up for another 5 years, getting 10 years of life out of the Mac minis. It worked surprisingly well.

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday February 12 2018, @04:06PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Monday February 12 2018, @04:06PM (#636718) Journal

    Curious to see so many people commenting about how well X forwarding works, as that hasn't been my experience AT ALL.

    I've got a media center PC that's connected only to a projector. It takes a few minutes for the projector to boot up, so sometimes if I just want to drop a link into Transmission or something I'll use X forwarding from my laptop instead. The only problem is it's SO DAMN SLOW. Both devices connected to the same router (one on wifi, but that should still be far better than the people saying it works fine *over the Internet*), and the speed is comparable to when I connect to my parents' PC using something like Chrome Remote Desktop...which has to go across a satellite link. You'll click a button, then go make a cup of coffee, and come back to see the next dialog box just drawing to the screen. Don't use it all that often though, so it could just be the transmission-gtk application doing something wrong...?

(1)