5 ms·

That chapter was dumb even when it came out. X is awesome and it's amazing how well it has stood the test of time. I am not looking forward to the day when I wo

by donio 7y ago

That chapter was dumb even when it came out. X is awesome and it's amazing how well it has stood the test of time. I am not looking forward to the day when I won't be able to do half the things I do today with my EXWM setup because we needed to have "every frame perfect".

ddingus 7y ago
It is like UNIX. The people who created X thought multi user graphical computing all the way through. We may decide that should not be a thing. I think we will struggle, some time will pass, and then it will be a thing, meaning X will just get reinvented.
- netsharc 7y ago
  Probably using a node.js background, websocket, and DOM-manipulating JavaScript.. or WebGL for performance..
  - bitwize 7y ago
    It will only take up a couple of GiB of RAM to display hello, world.
    - unlinked_dll 7y ago
      More like 200MB but who cares? RAM is cheap(er than CPU cycles and developer salaries)
      - bitwize 7y ago
        Well, I projected forward a few years and imagined how it would be when software "evolves" and becomes more "modern".
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    That is NeWS being reinvented, with JavaScript taking the place of Postscript, not X.
- astrodust 7y ago
  X in all of its ugly glory was and is still better than RDP.
  - dagenix 7y ago
    I'm thinking you may not have actually used RDP over a medium-to-low bandwidth or medium-to-high latency connection. Because RDP is still usable and X is a laggy mess.
    - kjs3 7y ago
      I regularly ran X over ISDN back when that was a thing. Framemaker wasn't exactly snappy, but it was usable. Lighter stuff was fine. Watching contemporary RDP keep up over 64k was painful.
      - catblast 7y ago
        With server side font rendering all but forgotten among other things, any modern app will struggle over a low bandwidth link well. And X has always been crap for latency, even with xcb, it ends up being very round-trip heavy. Modern technology has addressed the bandwidth problem, but has a much bigger challenge with the second.
    - wnoise 7y ago
      Xlib, the original C binding to the protocol is not great in that situation, because it makes many asynchronous requests look synchronous. Most toolkits are pretty terrible in that situation. libxcb instead of Xlib can be a great improvement as it exposes what can be asynchronous (though it often isn't used well).
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    Modern RDP can do seemless remote audio and full 60fps video and 3d graphics, on windows servers. Linux server stuff like libvirtd just uses it as a glorified VNC. It blows away x11 forwarding. https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/ is a vastly superior solution for linux servers.
  - 7y ago
- catblast 7y ago
  That reinvention happened years ago, and it is in the likes of things such as Citrix -- which has existed for years now. It is used widely in industries outside of software development.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    Those work great, honestly. What I really mean by "reinvent" is the multi-user graphical computing model itself. We've done a stellar job pushing a desktop out to someone. I've used a variety of these things, from the basic VNC on up, and they are pretty great. The better ones are damn tough to differentiate from local UX. People are running CAD on stuff like Citrix and it works. Better than one might expect too. That's more like plucking out the killer use case and optimizing it. Great move, worth it, not bad, etc... There are a lot of ways to use computers, and applications though. X, warts and all, did offer up pretty fantastic flexibility and usability (when apps were well realized). A few things: Today we've got cloud computing, local computing, mobile computing, wearables. Lots of displays, more coming. Thinking about it from the X POV, sort of how they thought about it back then, that looks an awful lot like: Application server, desktop computer, other computer. They envisioned more than one person using a single computer. Multiple people using multiple computers, multiple people using modest computers to do UX with one or more powerful ones. And on that point, I used to use multiple powerful computers with a single modest one all the time. Maybe rethinking it again, like they did with X back in the day, would push the boundaries some. Who knows what people would do? Someone walks into a room, has presentation on their wearable, and pushes it's display to a nearby machine, or both display and UX. They keep their data where it lives, on their device, but can benefit from the more robust UX. Mobile computing devices are getting really powerful. Run an app on one from a laptop, easily, again, perhaps keeping data local to the mobile, for whatever reasons. Just spitballing here, but the general thought I was trying to convey, without realizing it earlier, is maybe rethinking things from the basics forward, allowing for a lot of options, possible options, just might shake out other ways to do things, use all these crazy devices. Or not, just musing.
catblast 7y ago
Agree to disagree then. X is shit. I remember first reading that chapter in 1998, and it resonated then just as well as it does now. X is shit. It is the weirdest abstraction of network "transparency" which inevitably manages to require state on both ends of the network connection -- it isn't robust. How well does your X session do when there is a network hiccup? The protocol is round-trip heavy. Even with xcb, X clients need to make a tremendous number of round-trips, especially early on. There have been mitigations for X for low bandwidth links, but X networking has never been usable on high latency links. Ever forward X on an airplane? I pity you. The drawing model of X is an antiquated relic. Server side rendering is pretty much useless, such that X has basically become a sort of bastardized inefficient VNC. There's a reason no widely used screen remoting or thin-client system uses the X design. It was a poor idea then, and it is still deficient today.

by donio 7y ago

ddingus 7y ago

It is like UNIX. The people who created X thought multi user graphical computing all the way through. We may decide that should not be a thing. I think we will struggle, some time will pass, and then it will be a thing, meaning X will just get reinvented.

netsharc 7y ago
Probably using a node.js background, websocket, and DOM-manipulating JavaScript.. or WebGL for performance..
- bitwize 7y ago
  It will only take up a couple of GiB of RAM to display hello, world.
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    More like 200MB but who cares? RAM is cheap(er than CPU cycles and developer salaries)
    - bitwize 7y ago
      Well, I projected forward a few years and imagined how it would be when software "evolves" and becomes more "modern".
- pjmlp 7y ago
  That is NeWS being reinvented, with JavaScript taking the place of Postscript, not X.
astrodust 7y ago
X in all of its ugly glory was and is still better than RDP.
- dagenix 7y ago
  I'm thinking you may not have actually used RDP over a medium-to-low bandwidth or medium-to-high latency connection. Because RDP is still usable and X is a laggy mess.
  - kjs3 7y ago
    I regularly ran X over ISDN back when that was a thing. Framemaker wasn't exactly snappy, but it was usable. Lighter stuff was fine. Watching contemporary RDP keep up over 64k was painful.
    - catblast 7y ago
      With server side font rendering all but forgotten among other things, any modern app will struggle over a low bandwidth link well. And X has always been crap for latency, even with xcb, it ends up being very round-trip heavy. Modern technology has addressed the bandwidth problem, but has a much bigger challenge with the second.
  - wnoise 7y ago
    Xlib, the original C binding to the protocol is not great in that situation, because it makes many asynchronous requests look synchronous. Most toolkits are pretty terrible in that situation. libxcb instead of Xlib can be a great improvement as it exposes what can be asynchronous (though it often isn't used well).
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  Modern RDP can do seemless remote audio and full 60fps video and 3d graphics, on windows servers. Linux server stuff like libvirtd just uses it as a glorified VNC. It blows away x11 forwarding. https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/ is a vastly superior solution for linux servers.
- 7y ago
catblast 7y ago
That reinvention happened years ago, and it is in the likes of things such as Citrix -- which has existed for years now. It is used widely in industries outside of software development.
- ddingus 7y ago
  Those work great, honestly. What I really mean by "reinvent" is the multi-user graphical computing model itself. We've done a stellar job pushing a desktop out to someone. I've used a variety of these things, from the basic VNC on up, and they are pretty great. The better ones are damn tough to differentiate from local UX. People are running CAD on stuff like Citrix and it works. Better than one might expect too. That's more like plucking out the killer use case and optimizing it. Great move, worth it, not bad, etc... There are a lot of ways to use computers, and applications though. X, warts and all, did offer up pretty fantastic flexibility and usability (when apps were well realized). A few things: Today we've got cloud computing, local computing, mobile computing, wearables. Lots of displays, more coming. Thinking about it from the X POV, sort of how they thought about it back then, that looks an awful lot like: Application server, desktop computer, other computer. They envisioned more than one person using a single computer. Multiple people using multiple computers, multiple people using modest computers to do UX with one or more powerful ones. And on that point, I used to use multiple powerful computers with a single modest one all the time. Maybe rethinking it again, like they did with X back in the day, would push the boundaries some. Who knows what people would do? Someone walks into a room, has presentation on their wearable, and pushes it's display to a nearby machine, or both display and UX. They keep their data where it lives, on their device, but can benefit from the more robust UX. Mobile computing devices are getting really powerful. Run an app on one from a laptop, easily, again, perhaps keeping data local to the mobile, for whatever reasons. Just spitballing here, but the general thought I was trying to convey, without realizing it earlier, is maybe rethinking things from the basics forward, allowing for a lot of options, possible options, just might shake out other ways to do things, use all these crazy devices. Or not, just musing.

catblast 7y ago

Agree to disagree then. X is shit. I remember first reading that chapter in 1998, and it resonated then just as well as it does now. X is shit. It is the weirdest abstraction of network "transparency" which inevitably manages to require state on both ends of the network connection -- it isn't robust. How well does your X session do when there is a network hiccup? The protocol is round-trip heavy. Even with xcb, X clients need to make a tremendous number of round-trips, especially early on. There have been mitigations for X for low bandwidth links, but X networking has never been usable on high latency links. Ever forward X on an airplane? I pity you. The drawing model of X is an antiquated relic. Server side rendering is pretty much useless, such that X has basically become a sort of bastardized inefficient VNC. There's a reason no widely used screen remoting or thin-client system uses the X design. It was a poor idea then, and it is still deficient today.