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Comment by 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.

15 comments

throw0101a

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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.

    • gf000  1 day ago

      Well, we are using much higher resolutions with much higher frame rates and with more media-rich content.

      You surely agree that not having a good compression here is less than ideal.

      And it begs the question whether this is indeed the task of the display manager, or it's packing an unrelated functionality that could be better solved by another software.

      And we haven't even gotten to sound - should a display manager now suddenly also handle sound?

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  • 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.

    • gf000  11 hours ago

      I don't really get your first 2 paragraphs. We are talking about connecting remotely to another computer, you can't do much at the other end of a network call with a server allocated buffer - at most you can cache stuff there. But that ain't helping with a video or any kind of fancier than a solid rectangle graphics.

      And sure, simple UIs have their place - but they will also work just as well with a proper transport protocol, hell, they would compress even better. So just waypipe that simple UI as you see it fit.

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  • 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.

    • gf000  1 day ago

      > The overwhelming majority of applications belong in the same category as xeyes.

      Well, I'm not sure you are using that many xmotif apps. Most of the GUI programs are gtk/qt (and let's be honest, electron) - and they are mostly bitmaps to X's eyes (pun not intended). They don't use draw commands with such a small granularity that network transparency would benefit.

      And Arcan is so many things at once I'm not convinced it is a good alternative to Wayland. It has good ideas, but they sort of require the whole package. Meanwhile Wayland is just a minimal API over the Linux kernel API for managing display buffers, that can be extended with additional protocols.

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