Comment by ux266478

5 hours ago

It depends on what you mean by send. Wayland doesn't have network transparency, there's a bit of a song and dance you have to do to get that working properly. I'm not sure the state of that or of Wayland compositors in general on Mac.

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ux266478

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throw0101a  5 hours ago

> It depends on what you mean by send.

Currently I can:

    $ ssh -X somehost xeyes

and get a window on macOS.

  • gf000  1 hour ago

    For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it.

    X's network transparency was made at a time when we drawn two lines as UI, and for that it works very well. But today even your Todo app has a bunch of icons that are just bitmaps to X, and we can transfer those via much better means (that should probably not be baked into a display protocol).

    I think Wayland did the correct decision here. Just be a display protocol that knows about buffers and that's it.

    User space can then just transport buffers in any way they seem fit.

    Also, another interesting note, the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web, if you look at it squinted. And quite a few programs just simply expose a localhost port to avoid the "native GUI" issue wholesale.

    • throw0101a  18 minutes ago

      > For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it.

      I used run and use diskless SparcStation 5s with remote X on 10BASE2 network with the binaries running on Sun E3500s: it worked well enough for non-video web sites running Netscape 3.x. Also Matlab, Octave, Emacs, Vi(m), etc.

      I've used it to run backup application GUIs when I was still on DSL (<25Mbps) displaying at home many years ago, and it worked well then. I now have >100Mbps fibre at home, so doubt that bandwidth (or even latency) is worse.