8 ms·

You can also use Gimp via a RDP or VNC session, which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections, since those protocols do damage detection,

You can also use Gimp via a RDP or VNC session, which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections, since those protocols do damage detection, only sending updates of what's changed, and (lossy) compression. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the whole X11 is network transparent thing worked great when apps used the X11 drawing primitives. These days a significant number of X11 apps just render _everything_ (often including window decorations) "server-side" as bitmaps and then send them over the wire to the client to composite them. Essentially the X11 wire protocol has become a bitmap pipe. Wayland does the "bitmap pipe" thing more efficiently than X11.

testermelon 4y ago
> These days a significant number of X11 apps just render _everything_ "server-side" as bitmaps and then send them over the wire to the client to composite them. Inferring from the quotation, I take it you mean application server-side (instead of display server-side)? Just confirming.
- gunapologist99 4y ago
  Exactly. If GP doesn't even know how X11 works, then the opinion probably shouldn't carry a lot of weight. The "server" in X11 is the display that's sitting in front of you, not the application running on a remote workstation.
amelius 4y ago
Very much this. Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore. By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression? Also, VNC could be better if it could increase the quality of parts of the screen once they stop updating. E.g. in TigerVNC setting a low bitrate doesn't improve the quality of text once the text stops changing.
- chpatrick 4y ago
  https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Nomachine's server and client are closed-source but work great. For open-source solution for quickly remoting into an existing display, I use freerdp-shadow-cli which is way more stable than x11vnc and uses the RDP protocol instead.
  - RealStickman_ 4y ago
    Nomachine used to be open source. X2Go is the open source continuation of that.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      I think their current version is unrelated to what is now x2go
- msla 4y ago
  > Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore. It works well, though, and I'm not really interested in hearing that my own experience with it working well is a lie or some trick. Wayland gives up some things, and pretending that those things have no value isn't going to convince those of us who know they do. Also, those of us who use non-mainstream window managers (such as Window Maker) are not interested in hearing that we should switch to some UI which doesn't support our workflow just because it's more fashionable these days. There's a debate to be had here, and it needs to be had on the basis of facts, not lies.
  - gbin 4y ago
    TBH This response is way too aggressive for the original comment. The facts stated are simply that today it is more efficient to encode video for remote graphical sessions because the X11 applications already changed a long long time ago to adapt to the modern world of GPUs and accelerated compositing. BW, latency, efficiency, everything became better because a super computer with thousands of cores can do that and lighten the load on the CPUs. It doesn't say it doesn't work... It doesn't prevent you neither from running X11 or even booting up a PDP-11 if this is your favorite workflow!
    - d110af5ccf 4y ago
      The problem is that the Wayland fans have a tendency (at least I feel) to significantly misrepresent things in their favor. Statements like "oh that's actually more efficient on Wayland". No, Wayland is incapable of the sorts of optimizations X can do by design. It is only more efficient if the X app is doing things in a specific way that doesn't take advantage of huge parts of the X protocol. Granted, most modern apps do exactly that at this point. That doesn't make such statements any less of a misrepresentation though. A much more reasonable claim would be that the network transparency afforded by the X protocol adds significant complexity which is no longer utilized by the majority of mainstream apps today. As such there's a reasonable case for dropping all that complexity from the core system and leaving it to peripheral libraries to handle on a case by case basis for the apps that want to make use of it. And the idea of lossy compression while using an image editing program being a desirable thing (as suggested elsewhere in this comment chain) is laughable. It's already bad enough reading text that's gone through lossy compression. I would never want compression artifacts while manipulating an image. My impression of Wayland so far is that I like the technicals but absolutely detest the people I encounter pushing it as a solution (it's quite similar to Rust in that regard I suppose). They would probably meet less resistance if they took more care not to misrepresent the overall state of things. I'll leave the link to KDE Wayland "showstoppers" for reference. Certainly that list is far shorter today than it used to be and many (not all) of the items are now solely on KDE's end. Nonetheless, fanboys have been claiming that Wayland is "production ready" the entire time. https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers I'll switch to Wayland once it "just works" out of the box in terms of app integration on stable distributions including things like screen capture, fractional scaling factors, color management, all the stuff that works on X.
- satya71 4y ago
  I think TurboVNC had some extensions in that direction. But it’s been a while since I looked at it.
- aappleby 4y ago
  Parsec, I think?
- POPOSYS 4y ago
  X2GO is the way to go!
- torginus 4y ago
  If you're not afraid of big brother, I can recommend Chrome Remote desktop. You just install a server on the shared machine, and you can access your stuff using a regular browser thanks to the wonders of WebRTC.
  - j1elo 4y ago
    I recently had to uninstall Chrome Remote Desktop, because it was breaking my (Ubuntu) system's ability to handle some basic permissions, such as mounting USB disks. It turns out that CRD is well known for breaking other seemingly random things, such as accessing your printer: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1196248/automount-when-clicking-on-disks-in-gui-file-manager-suddenly-stopped-working-in https://askubuntu.com/questions/1196248/automount-when-click...
- baq 4y ago
  > By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression? try this: https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/
- izacus 4y ago
  XPRA uses H.264, PNG or JPEG compression. Chrome Remote Desktop will use VP9 these days.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  Not sure on the exact compression but I'm sure Nomachine/NX must use some video compressing n, I'm even able to watch video over it without it dying.
- mark254 4y ago
  > By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression? You want xpra.
- LtWorf 4y ago
  but doing ssh -X is scertainly easier than setting up vnc.
moomin 4y ago
I was around back in the days that X-servers were still very much a thing, and even then many thought they were an expensive and inefficient way of doing things. However, there were many who genuinely believed that networks would get arbitrarily faster and compute would not. Of course, the opposite happened, but in that alternative universe X’s design would have made sense.
- taeric 4y ago
  This isn't quite right. Both have gotten arbitrarily faster. That some folks have gigabit fiber is proof of that. Graphics have just outpaced networking. Easily.
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    I think one thing that sort of disappeared was the vision of thin clients everywhere. X11 is an obvious thin-client solution. Thin client for home use seems like a winning proposition. Rather than giving the kids a Raspberry Pi 400 or garage-sale P4 when they want their own computer, you could hook up another X terminal to a large shared Ryzen box. The hardware gets more efficiently used, files can easily be shared and centrally backed up, and nobody ends up being the guy with the cast-off or otherwise inferior PC.
    - moring 4y ago
      I think quite the opposite happened, just not on X11 level. The web browser is essentially a thin client nowadays. The fact that you have full client-side scripting is one thing that was IMHO a bit underdeveloped in classical thin-client systems because with that you can mask network latency much easier (though, admitted, I don't know a lot about how X11 handles this).
      - moomin 4y ago
        Don't agree at all. The web browser is essentially a standardized computer on which to run your fat client systems like SPAs. The browser can run arbitrary computation locally.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Editing my photos over a layer of video compression artifacts doesn't sound fun. Web apps are a more reasonable replacement for X11, with browser client much more capable to do low latency local processing. The only problem is lack of easy support for local apps and LAN-distributed apps. Probably still easier to add than to support low input latency eventually consistant Canvas over X11 or VNC.
- kaba0 4y ago
  There are lossy and lossless compression algorithms.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The roles of client and server being force-swapped is another perhaps unfortunate development.
  - msh 4y ago
    Why? I think who should be client and who should be server is entirely context/application specific. Sometimes I want to be able to connect to a server from any random client and continue the session.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Because now you never know which is which without a separate explanation. Might just as well call them A and B.
cbm-vic-20 4y ago
> my understanding is that the whole X11 is network transparent thing worked great when apps used the X11 drawing primitives. It did. It was awesome to be able to run one of the expensive academic apps from any X terminal on campus. Network security was largely non-existent then, and you could run X apps not just across campus but across the Internet. I remember a really early web page that had a text field (for your host name) and a button that would start a particular app on their side and would display on your local X server. It wasn't very fast. Anyway, all that died as Athena and Motif began to look dated as newer applications in the mid-90s started using more and more bitmaps.
- Rediscover 4y ago
  Completely off-topic, and I wish I could DM You without extra spam here, but great handle. Commodore Business Machines... Ever use a PET? Loved those things.
ciphol 4y ago
Is there a user-transparent way to run Gimp over RDP/VNC, similar to "ssh -X" for X11?
- razemio 4y ago
  If I understand you correctly, yes. freexrdp has an option to render only a single window instead of the hole desktop. This works amazingly well and feels native. This is the trick WinApps uses. You could either use WinApps or create your own script and add it to a desktop entry. Users can then open RDP Gimp like any other application without even noticing.
retcore 4y ago
>which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections, Er, IRIX was pushing 12 bits and alpha channel around over X on twisted pairs c.a. 1993.
destructionator 4y ago
> since those protocols do damage detection, only sending updates of what's changed So does X. > and (lossy) compression. This is legitimate though, the X protocol has no support for any kind of bitmap compression and it can sometimes be pretty painful. Though internets getting faster and faster too so it isn't necessarily a big deal especially since it does have bitmap caching and some display-side rendering capabilities, but it sure would be nice if you could send other formats on the wire.

testermelon 4y ago

> These days a significant number of X11 apps just render _everything_ "server-side" as bitmaps and then send them over the wire to the client to composite them. Inferring from the quotation, I take it you mean application server-side (instead of display server-side)? Just confirming.

gunapologist99 4y ago
Exactly. If GP doesn't even know how X11 works, then the opinion probably shouldn't carry a lot of weight. The "server" in X11 is the display that's sitting in front of you, not the application running on a remote workstation.

amelius 4y ago

Very much this. Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore. By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression? Also, VNC could be better if it could increase the quality of parts of the screen once they stop updating. E.g. in TigerVNC setting a low bitrate doesn't improve the quality of text once the text stops changing.

chpatrick 4y ago
https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/
aidenn0 4y ago
Nomachine's server and client are closed-source but work great. For open-source solution for quickly remoting into an existing display, I use freerdp-shadow-cli which is way more stable than x11vnc and uses the RDP protocol instead.
- RealStickman_ 4y ago
  Nomachine used to be open source. X2Go is the open source continuation of that.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I think their current version is unrelated to what is now x2go
msla 4y ago
> Running the X11 protocol over the network is usually not a good idea anymore. It works well, though, and I'm not really interested in hearing that my own experience with it working well is a lie or some trick. Wayland gives up some things, and pretending that those things have no value isn't going to convince those of us who know they do. Also, those of us who use non-mainstream window managers (such as Window Maker) are not interested in hearing that we should switch to some UI which doesn't support our workflow just because it's more fashionable these days. There's a debate to be had here, and it needs to be had on the basis of facts, not lies.
- gbin 4y ago
  TBH This response is way too aggressive for the original comment. The facts stated are simply that today it is more efficient to encode video for remote graphical sessions because the X11 applications already changed a long long time ago to adapt to the modern world of GPUs and accelerated compositing. BW, latency, efficiency, everything became better because a super computer with thousands of cores can do that and lighten the load on the CPUs. It doesn't say it doesn't work... It doesn't prevent you neither from running X11 or even booting up a PDP-11 if this is your favorite workflow!
  - d110af5ccf 4y ago
    The problem is that the Wayland fans have a tendency (at least I feel) to significantly misrepresent things in their favor. Statements like "oh that's actually more efficient on Wayland". No, Wayland is incapable of the sorts of optimizations X can do by design. It is only more efficient if the X app is doing things in a specific way that doesn't take advantage of huge parts of the X protocol. Granted, most modern apps do exactly that at this point. That doesn't make such statements any less of a misrepresentation though. A much more reasonable claim would be that the network transparency afforded by the X protocol adds significant complexity which is no longer utilized by the majority of mainstream apps today. As such there's a reasonable case for dropping all that complexity from the core system and leaving it to peripheral libraries to handle on a case by case basis for the apps that want to make use of it. And the idea of lossy compression while using an image editing program being a desirable thing (as suggested elsewhere in this comment chain) is laughable. It's already bad enough reading text that's gone through lossy compression. I would never want compression artifacts while manipulating an image. My impression of Wayland so far is that I like the technicals but absolutely detest the people I encounter pushing it as a solution (it's quite similar to Rust in that regard I suppose). They would probably meet less resistance if they took more care not to misrepresent the overall state of things. I'll leave the link to KDE Wayland "showstoppers" for reference. Certainly that list is far shorter today than it used to be and many (not all) of the items are now solely on KDE's end. Nonetheless, fanboys have been claiming that Wayland is "production ready" the entire time. https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers I'll switch to Wayland once it "just works" out of the box in terms of app integration on stable distributions including things like screen capture, fractional scaling factors, color management, all the stuff that works on X.
satya71 4y ago
I think TurboVNC had some extensions in that direction. But it’s been a while since I looked at it.
aappleby 4y ago
Parsec, I think?
POPOSYS 4y ago
X2GO is the way to go!
torginus 4y ago
If you're not afraid of big brother, I can recommend Chrome Remote desktop. You just install a server on the shared machine, and you can access your stuff using a regular browser thanks to the wonders of WebRTC.
- j1elo 4y ago
  I recently had to uninstall Chrome Remote Desktop, because it was breaking my (Ubuntu) system's ability to handle some basic permissions, such as mounting USB disks. It turns out that CRD is well known for breaking other seemingly random things, such as accessing your printer: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1196248/automount-when-clicking-on-disks-in-gui-file-manager-suddenly-stopped-working-in https://askubuntu.com/questions/1196248/automount-when-click...
baq 4y ago
> By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression? try this: https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/
izacus 4y ago
XPRA uses H.264, PNG or JPEG compression. Chrome Remote Desktop will use VP9 these days.
stuaxo 4y ago
Not sure on the exact compression but I'm sure Nomachine/NX must use some video compressing n, I'm even able to watch video over it without it dying.
mark254 4y ago
> By the way, does anyone know of a VNC-like solution that can use MPEG compression? You want xpra.
LtWorf 4y ago
but doing ssh -X is scertainly easier than setting up vnc.

moomin 4y ago

I was around back in the days that X-servers were still very much a thing, and even then many thought they were an expensive and inefficient way of doing things. However, there were many who genuinely believed that networks would get arbitrarily faster and compute would not. Of course, the opposite happened, but in that alternative universe X’s design would have made sense.

taeric 4y ago
This isn't quite right. Both have gotten arbitrarily faster. That some folks have gigabit fiber is proof of that. Graphics have just outpaced networking. Easily.
- hakfoo 4y ago
  I think one thing that sort of disappeared was the vision of thin clients everywhere. X11 is an obvious thin-client solution. Thin client for home use seems like a winning proposition. Rather than giving the kids a Raspberry Pi 400 or garage-sale P4 when they want their own computer, you could hook up another X terminal to a large shared Ryzen box. The hardware gets more efficiently used, files can easily be shared and centrally backed up, and nobody ends up being the guy with the cast-off or otherwise inferior PC.
  - moring 4y ago
    I think quite the opposite happened, just not on X11 level. The web browser is essentially a thin client nowadays. The fact that you have full client-side scripting is one thing that was IMHO a bit underdeveloped in classical thin-client systems because with that you can mask network latency much easier (though, admitted, I don't know a lot about how X11 handles this).
    - moomin 4y ago
      Don't agree at all. The web browser is essentially a standardized computer on which to run your fat client systems like SPAs. The browser can run arbitrary computation locally.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Editing my photos over a layer of video compression artifacts doesn't sound fun. Web apps are a more reasonable replacement for X11, with browser client much more capable to do low latency local processing. The only problem is lack of easy support for local apps and LAN-distributed apps. Probably still easier to add than to support low input latency eventually consistant Canvas over X11 or VNC.

kaba0 4y ago
There are lossy and lossless compression algorithms.
ncmncm 4y ago
The roles of client and server being force-swapped is another perhaps unfortunate development.
- msh 4y ago
  Why? I think who should be client and who should be server is entirely context/application specific. Sometimes I want to be able to connect to a server from any random client and continue the session.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Because now you never know which is which without a separate explanation. Might just as well call them A and B.

cbm-vic-20 4y ago

> my understanding is that the whole X11 is network transparent thing worked great when apps used the X11 drawing primitives. It did. It was awesome to be able to run one of the expensive academic apps from any X terminal on campus. Network security was largely non-existent then, and you could run X apps not just across campus but across the Internet. I remember a really early web page that had a text field (for your host name) and a button that would start a particular app on their side and would display on your local X server. It wasn't very fast. Anyway, all that died as Athena and Motif began to look dated as newer applications in the mid-90s started using more and more bitmaps.

Rediscover 4y ago
Completely off-topic, and I wish I could DM You without extra spam here, but great handle. Commodore Business Machines... Ever use a PET? Loved those things.

ciphol 4y ago

Is there a user-transparent way to run Gimp over RDP/VNC, similar to "ssh -X" for X11?

razemio 4y ago
If I understand you correctly, yes. freexrdp has an option to render only a single window instead of the hole desktop. This works amazingly well and feels native. This is the trick WinApps uses. You could either use WinApps or create your own script and add it to a desktop entry. Users can then open RDP Gimp like any other application without even noticing.

retcore 4y ago

>which will give much better performance on low-bandwidth connections, Er, IRIX was pushing 12 bits and alpha channel around over X on twisted pairs c.a. 1993.

destructionator 4y ago

> since those protocols do damage detection, only sending updates of what's changed So does X. > and (lossy) compression. This is legitimate though, the X protocol has no support for any kind of bitmap compression and it can sometimes be pretty painful. Though internets getting faster and faster too so it isn't necessarily a big deal especially since it does have bitmap caching and some display-side rendering capabilities, but it sure would be nice if you could send other formats on the wire.