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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, 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.

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