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X's Network Transparency Has Wound Up Mostly Being a Failure

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe-Y-will-be-better dept.

canopic jug writes:

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: 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.

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  • (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.