SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by jmorris on Sunday February 11 2018, @06:23AM
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.