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 urza9814 on Monday February 12 2018, @04:06PM
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...?