3 ms·
It was pretty great when I was a university student using X forwarding within the campus network between my dorm and the CS department (in either direction). Ce
by jkaplowitz 7y ago
It was pretty great when I was a university student using X forwarding within the campus network between my dorm and the CS department (in either direction). Certainly not as fast as local, but extremely usable when not trying to do graphics-centric things. (Even using Eclipse was viable.)
Your mileage may vary by use case and bandwidth, especially over the public internet. But if someone has a similar use case to mine in 2019, it's still probably usable.
- a-wu 7y ago+1 to this. For my first two years the university didn't have student Matlab licenses but the CS department machines had copies so I would ssh -X for my coursework requiring Matlab (needed the GUI to see plots).
- therein 7y agoYup, I did this in college all the time as well. It was usable for most applications. Even wireshark is usable this way.
- majewsky 7y agoEven if it's usable, it's probably not a good idea. X windows are not rendered by the server anymore. The client (i.e. the application) renders them and just transmits a full pixmap to the server. Depending on the redraw strategy, you could have a worst-case scenario where 60 frames per second of the entire window are transmitted completely uncompressed (except for the compression that SSH applies). You'll be sailing much more efficiently by using a VNC client.
- gmueckl 7y agoTo be pedantic, this is true with "modern" toolkits (like, this cemtury). Applications using Motif or Xt or anything similarly ancient still do server side drawing and they absolutely shine with todays network latency and speed. But most applications moved on from.these toolkits, with good reason.