8 ms·

Honestly, I think people's reliance on X forwarding is just due to the fact that it happens to exist, not because they really need it. There's nothing like X fo

by hpfr 6y ago

Honestly, I think people's reliance on X forwarding is just due to the fact that it happens to exist, not because they really need it. There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. If X forwarding didn't exist people would have figured out how to do what they needed over SSH with text or when GUI's are irreplaceable sysadmins would have set up an actual remote desktop solution like on other modern operating systems.

worik 6y ago
It was the original reason to invent X. Literally
- oblio 6y ago
  And the adoption has been huge outside of Unix circles... MacOS doesn't use it, Windows doesn't use it. Even Linux is moving away from it. That's pretty damning for X as a technology during a time when even Windows has started to offer native curl and ssh, just saying.
  - thekyle 6y ago
    Currently the only way to run GUI apps in WSL is x forwarding.
  - jerf 6y ago
    Gosh, the technology only lasted 36 years so far, and definitely has a few years left to go in it before it is "dead". What a striking condemnation that it only made it 40-ish years before being replaced.
  - znpy 6y ago
    Still there are xservers for both windows and Mac. How comes?
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Windows and MacOS have been (and are) based on the model of buying a copy of a piece of software for each piece of hardware. The idea of only buying a copy for one machine and running it somewhere else is difficult for that model. Ubiquitous networking is common in the Unix world, but much less prevalent in the Microsoft and Apple worlds.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      > Windows and MacOS have been (and are) based on the model of buying a copy of a piece of software for each piece of hardware. At least anecdotally, I'm not sure I can find a whole lot of supporting evidence for this -- the vast majority of the commercial applications I use on a daily basis let you install them on any compatible system that you own. This isn't just a byproduct of "well, they're not checking"; it's usually explicitly written in the license, it happens with programs that make you enter license codes they validate before running, and notably, it's very explicitly the model of the Mac App Store. Sometimes the license says only one copy of the program can be in use at a time without a site license, but for individual use that's generally fine in practice. (I haven't seen a program that's actually annoying enough to check for running copies of itself on a LAN and shut down if you're violating the license in decades at this point, although I'm sure they're still lurking out there in weird niches. It sounds like something Autodesk software would do.) Anyway -- maybe running programs remotely using the Xserver model never took off in the Mac world, even after OS X, because there was no prohibition against just installing the software on multiple machines? In practice, it's not something I've missed very often, I admit; while I sometimes like to edit text files remotely, that's not something that feels like it would really be improved by this model over using a local editor that can open files over the network. (Edited to note that I'm not suggesting there aren't still valid use cases for X11's server/client model! They're just not ones that have impacted me; if they did, I'd run XQuartz, which I don't love, but it'd probably get the job done.)
      - hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
        Per seat licences are very standard. Interesting you've never encountered it when e.g. an MS Office 365 subscription is for so many devices (seats).
  - kergonath 6y ago
    Because anything that does not exist on Windows is useless, of course...
levosmetalo 6y ago
Yet, many people use windows and I still miss X forwarding. RDP and VNC are just not a replacement for being able to start 3 different programs on 3 different remote computers, and have them all sitting together on screen next to each other.
- u801e 6y ago
  You should look into xrdp. It's like X forwarding, but with the ability to detach and reattach to a running application like screen or tmux.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  Technically, RDP allows you to only launch one application as opposed to a whole desktop. They call that RemoteApp. That you can't just launch that on every machine you want (in particular non server installs) is more a limitation of Microsoft's licensing model than of the protocol itself. For me, from a usability point of view, RDP runs circles around the other solutions. I've used this fairly often during the lockdowns and even over a shitty DSL connection there was close to no lag.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    RDP works well if you want to connect to a remote machine, then work only on that machine for a significant amount of time. For me, I need to switch in and out of several different RDP sessions, which is a nightmare. Alt tab works either within a session if full screened, or within the local computer if not full screened. That means I need to also periodically use ctrl alt break to switch between full screen and windowed. In windowed mode, I can either have scrollbars to view a subsection, or I can scale the window. Doing the right thing, changing the size of the remote desktop when the local window is resized, isn't an option because that is set at connection time. Sometimes, for firewall reasons, I need to have needed RDP sessions. At this point, everything performs poorly, and I need to drag the overlayed blue bars off of each other, then interact with one or the other. I miss SSH, and want better support for it. Nested connections can be handled with SSH tunnels. Text connections are fast enough to do anything on the slowest of connections. If I need a GUI, I can open up a single window through X11, without additional setup with RemoteApp. Windows remote management through RDP is slow, clunky, error-prone, and inflexible by comparison.
jcelerier 6y ago
> There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. if windows was enough for my needs I'd use it ?
II2II 6y ago
The happens to exist bit turns out to be very important. I can login to a machine and run an X client without installing and configuring extra software on the server. If I am using a desktop with X installed (most *ix based systems), there is no extra software to install and configure on that end either. The worse case scenario is the necessity to install an X server on platforms like macOS and Windows. The same sort of thing can be said for Remote Desktop. If you're using a version of Windows that includes it, it is wonderful to use because it is just there. Which is better? It depends on how you're using it. I generally prefer Remote Desktop for my use case because it takes care of audio and it is easy to resume sessions. That being said, those features don't matter to me most of the time so X is just as useful.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Right, the shift away from X doesn't mean the death of using GUI apps remotely, it just means moving to a Remote Desktop model instead of telling apps that their render target is your X server through a tunnel.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    Could you flesh this out a bit? What is the official Wayland model for doing "Remote Desktop"?
    - Spivak 6y ago
      I hesitate to call it an official model but the short version of the current direction is that the compositor acts as the glue -- providing the final rendered scene and the final merged audio stream to the client over some protocol (like VNC but doesn't have to be) and providing inputs and events to itself and the client applications. How all of this works on the backend is a combination of PipeWire to multiplex video sources and PulseAudio to multiplex audio sources. There's nothing outright preventing something like X forwarding and https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html is a really cool project that makes it work. From that author: > The main difficulty in producing such a tool is that Wayland protocol messages primarily include control information, and the large data transfers of graphical applications are implemented through shared memory. waypipe must then identify and serialize changes to the shared memory buffers into messages to be transferred over a socket.
jimbokun 6y ago
> There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. Which is why the people who need this functionality run Linux, not Windows.
znpy 6y ago
You haven't worked in operations, have you?
tokenrove 6y ago
No, it was the need for this on Windows that made Citrix all its money.
toast0 6y ago
> There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. You can run an X server on Windows, there's a bunch to choose from. That lets you run an application on a remote unix system and show it on a Windows system in front of the user. It might be nice to run an application on a remote windows system, but that's always tied to expensive licenses; some of those systems sound like they could be pretty seamless (at least as seamless as remote X), but I don't have experience with them. Remote X has its problems, but it enables a lot of use cases with a minimum amount of hassle. Connect, run the application, close it when you're done. Other solutions with a remote desktop require starting that session somehow, and either leaving it running or shutting it down somehow. That can be useful if you want a long running session, but is more hassle if you don't.
bsder 6y ago
> Honestly, I think people's reliance on X forwarding is just due to the fact that it happens to exist, not because they really need it. Visual Studio Code has "Remote Development" (which is under a Non-Open Source License(!)) because they don't have "X11 Forwarding". Think about the waste of implementing that code--in every application--rather than being able to do display forwarding.

by hpfr 6y ago

worik 6y ago

It was the original reason to invent X. Literally

oblio 6y ago
And the adoption has been huge outside of Unix circles... MacOS doesn't use it, Windows doesn't use it. Even Linux is moving away from it. That's pretty damning for X as a technology during a time when even Windows has started to offer native curl and ssh, just saying.
- thekyle 6y ago
  Currently the only way to run GUI apps in WSL is x forwarding.
- jerf 6y ago
  Gosh, the technology only lasted 36 years so far, and definitely has a few years left to go in it before it is "dead". What a striking condemnation that it only made it 40-ish years before being replaced.
- znpy 6y ago
  Still there are xservers for both windows and Mac. How comes?
- mcguire 6y ago
  Windows and MacOS have been (and are) based on the model of buying a copy of a piece of software for each piece of hardware. The idea of only buying a copy for one machine and running it somewhere else is difficult for that model. Ubiquitous networking is common in the Unix world, but much less prevalent in the Microsoft and Apple worlds.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    > Windows and MacOS have been (and are) based on the model of buying a copy of a piece of software for each piece of hardware. At least anecdotally, I'm not sure I can find a whole lot of supporting evidence for this -- the vast majority of the commercial applications I use on a daily basis let you install them on any compatible system that you own. This isn't just a byproduct of "well, they're not checking"; it's usually explicitly written in the license, it happens with programs that make you enter license codes they validate before running, and notably, it's very explicitly the model of the Mac App Store. Sometimes the license says only one copy of the program can be in use at a time without a site license, but for individual use that's generally fine in practice. (I haven't seen a program that's actually annoying enough to check for running copies of itself on a LAN and shut down if you're violating the license in decades at this point, although I'm sure they're still lurking out there in weird niches. It sounds like something Autodesk software would do.) Anyway -- maybe running programs remotely using the Xserver model never took off in the Mac world, even after OS X, because there was no prohibition against just installing the software on multiple machines? In practice, it's not something I've missed very often, I admit; while I sometimes like to edit text files remotely, that's not something that feels like it would really be improved by this model over using a local editor that can open files over the network. (Edited to note that I'm not suggesting there aren't still valid use cases for X11's server/client model! They're just not ones that have impacted me; if they did, I'd run XQuartz, which I don't love, but it'd probably get the job done.)
    - hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
      Per seat licences are very standard. Interesting you've never encountered it when e.g. an MS Office 365 subscription is for so many devices (seats).
- kergonath 6y ago
  Because anything that does not exist on Windows is useless, of course...

levosmetalo 6y ago

Yet, many people use windows and I still miss X forwarding. RDP and VNC are just not a replacement for being able to start 3 different programs on 3 different remote computers, and have them all sitting together on screen next to each other.

u801e 6y ago
You should look into xrdp. It's like X forwarding, but with the ability to detach and reattach to a running application like screen or tmux.
vladvasiliu 6y ago
Technically, RDP allows you to only launch one application as opposed to a whole desktop. They call that RemoteApp. That you can't just launch that on every machine you want (in particular non server installs) is more a limitation of Microsoft's licensing model than of the protocol itself. For me, from a usability point of view, RDP runs circles around the other solutions. I've used this fairly often during the lockdowns and even over a shitty DSL connection there was close to no lag.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  RDP works well if you want to connect to a remote machine, then work only on that machine for a significant amount of time. For me, I need to switch in and out of several different RDP sessions, which is a nightmare. Alt tab works either within a session if full screened, or within the local computer if not full screened. That means I need to also periodically use ctrl alt break to switch between full screen and windowed. In windowed mode, I can either have scrollbars to view a subsection, or I can scale the window. Doing the right thing, changing the size of the remote desktop when the local window is resized, isn't an option because that is set at connection time. Sometimes, for firewall reasons, I need to have needed RDP sessions. At this point, everything performs poorly, and I need to drag the overlayed blue bars off of each other, then interact with one or the other. I miss SSH, and want better support for it. Nested connections can be handled with SSH tunnels. Text connections are fast enough to do anything on the slowest of connections. If I need a GUI, I can open up a single window through X11, without additional setup with RemoteApp. Windows remote management through RDP is slow, clunky, error-prone, and inflexible by comparison.

jcelerier 6y ago

> There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. if windows was enough for my needs I'd use it ?

II2II 6y ago

The happens to exist bit turns out to be very important. I can login to a machine and run an X client without installing and configuring extra software on the server. If I am using a desktop with X installed (most *ix based systems), there is no extra software to install and configure on that end either. The worse case scenario is the necessity to install an X server on platforms like macOS and Windows. The same sort of thing can be said for Remote Desktop. If you're using a version of Windows that includes it, it is wonderful to use because it is just there. Which is better? It depends on how you're using it. I generally prefer Remote Desktop for my use case because it takes care of audio and it is easy to resume sessions. That being said, those features don't matter to me most of the time so X is just as useful.

Spivak 6y ago
Right, the shift away from X doesn't mean the death of using GUI apps remotely, it just means moving to a Remote Desktop model instead of telling apps that their render target is your X server through a tunnel.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  Could you flesh this out a bit? What is the official Wayland model for doing "Remote Desktop"?
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I hesitate to call it an official model but the short version of the current direction is that the compositor acts as the glue -- providing the final rendered scene and the final merged audio stream to the client over some protocol (like VNC but doesn't have to be) and providing inputs and events to itself and the client applications. How all of this works on the backend is a combination of PipeWire to multiplex video sources and PulseAudio to multiplex audio sources. There's nothing outright preventing something like X forwarding and https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html is a really cool project that makes it work. From that author: > The main difficulty in producing such a tool is that Wayland protocol messages primarily include control information, and the large data transfers of graphical applications are implemented through shared memory. waypipe must then identify and serialize changes to the shared memory buffers into messages to be transferred over a socket.

jimbokun 6y ago

> There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. Which is why the people who need this functionality run Linux, not Windows.

znpy 6y ago

You haven't worked in operations, have you?

tokenrove 6y ago

No, it was the need for this on Windows that made Citrix all its money.

toast0 6y ago

> There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. You can run an X server on Windows, there's a bunch to choose from. That lets you run an application on a remote unix system and show it on a Windows system in front of the user. It might be nice to run an application on a remote windows system, but that's always tied to expensive licenses; some of those systems sound like they could be pretty seamless (at least as seamless as remote X), but I don't have experience with them. Remote X has its problems, but it enables a lot of use cases with a minimum amount of hassle. Connect, run the application, close it when you're done. Other solutions with a remote desktop require starting that session somehow, and either leaving it running or shutting it down somehow. That can be useful if you want a long running session, but is more hassle if you don't.

bsder 6y ago

> Honestly, I think people's reliance on X forwarding is just due to the fact that it happens to exist, not because they really need it. Visual Studio Code has "Remote Development" (which is under a Non-Open Source License(!)) because they don't have "X11 Forwarding". Think about the waste of implementing that code--in every application--rather than being able to do display forwarding.