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