Comment by roywiggins
20 hours ago
Even easier is just using an X server, if you have it set up properly you just need to run the remote app and the window pops up on your machine.
(I think terminal-based GUIs are neat just for fluidity of use- you can pop one open during a terminal session and close it without switching to mouse or shifting your attention away from the terminal. They can also be a nice addon to a primarily CLI utility without introducing big dependencies)
Yeah I love that about X. I remember in the 90s when I first figured that out. I was logged in from a university workstation into my home computer with SSH and I launched my mail client or something and I thought doh, stupid that will only popup locally.
Then colour my suprise when it popped up on my screen right there. Slow as molasses but still. Wow. Magic.
It's a shame Wayland dropped this. Yes I know there's waypipe but it's not the same.
> It's a shame Wayland dropped this.
It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days, there's a reason approximately no one has used remote X after the mid-90s. It's a neat party trick, but I don't blame the Wayland authors for not wanting to support it.
> one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows
In the 80s/90s this wasn't feasible due to network latency and bandwidth, but it's pretty common now to do exactly this, with VNC and other remote desktop protocols.
It is, there were tools like NX that made it entirely usable even latencywise. And these days we're really going more and more to remote computing.
In the time when wayland was invented it made sense because we did everything purely local. But now it's as outdated as X11 was in 2010.
And yes I still use it a lot. It works well. Networks have become a lot better and even most cloud compute I use is geographically nearby.
What made it slow back then was that I only had a 128kbit uplink at home. And the uni had 2 mbit for the whole computer science building :)
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Like what? X forwarding has pretty much always been the thing most likely to work for me and I haven't been able to find any equivalent.
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Waypipe looks interesting.
The main advantage of x forwarding for me was when I'd randomly need it and had nothing set up ahead of time. Hopefully it starts getting installed in distros by default eventually.