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Comment by ux266478

1 day 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  1 day ago

> It depends on what you mean by send.

Currently I can:

    $ ssh -X somehost xeyes

and get a window on macOS.

  • gf000  1 day 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  1 day 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.

      2 replies →

    • throwaw111  13 hours ago

      Watching a video will be the same as a on Wayland, just sending a video buffer, no?

      The icons: you allocate memory on server for that and do not transfare the icon everytime. I think x11 works like that, not sure.

      I know GUI lib that you can still compile with freetype disabled. Not everyone need the GUIs you talking about. Everyone is using cars, so lets ban bikes.. it does not need to be like that.

      I find X11 RPC useful, simple UI is ok.. you can write programs that will run on any slow or not computer, remotely. Web is not that simple, it is different way of programming, it is not transparent. Web is useful for commerce, but not for controlling machines at factories or pilot cabins. IMO.

      6 replies →

    • ux266478  1 day ago

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

      This is extremely misleading. Web browsers (and games) are the worst case for X11's network transparency. The overwhelming majority of applications belong in the same category as xeyes.

      > the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web

      It's Arcan, which solved this problem without sacrificing network transparency at the altar.

      2 replies →