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> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. Have you ever tried this? I've neve

> While on the road, you can use your notebook to open a Gimp session on your home machine and edit an image stored there. Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. It would be cool but to be good all apps would have to be designed with it in mind. And they are not. The software moves on from X11 as a protocol for remote computing. Even well before Wayland, all the things you'd use X over the network for were moved to web browsers.

gpm 4y ago
I've used it in the past month to impromptu demonstrate something that I had set up on a GUI app at home (with a lot of dependencies) from my laptop. Yes, it's laggy, but it's nice to have the option, and it's really nice that it's already integrated with ssh and doesn't need extra setup (past passing `-Y` to ssh). If this was the only thing I'd lose by switching window managers it wouldn't be a dealbreaker.
II2II 4y ago
> Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. I did, nearly 20 years ago. The computers were over 2500 km apart, though it was over a good university to university connection. The Gimp was certainly usable, though I will not go as far as saying it was good since 20 year old memories can be hazy and the standards of the day are different from the standards of today. I also experimented with X over a 14.4 kbps modem a few years earlier. It was mostly while writing papers (plotting graphs and viewing dvi files, not the actual writing). It was slow, but it got the job done and was better than juggling documents between software on two computers. The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop. All of this remote desktop stuff strikes me as being better suited for accessing a remote system, rather than for running remote software.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop That sounds like a UX problem that’s quite trivial to fix, not a technical one and absolutely not inherent with Wayland.
  - II2II 4y ago
    If you're talking about shipping a singular rectangular region across the network, possibly. Yet not all windows are rectangular and many applications use more than one window. Then there are issues with how the application interacts with the desktop environment, where the application thinks it is being on computer A when it is actually being displayed on computer B. It is not a trivial UX problem.
erik_seaberg 4y ago
This is what I keep coming back to. A backend that targets Javascript can take advantage of the desktop/laptop GPU. A backend that targets Wayland has to render everything locally in software (no GPU), and nobody I’ve ever worked for wants to build a system that runs this way. Xaw and Motif worked okay, and it’s getting hard to imagine a heavy user who has access to only one computer, yet newer GUI toolkits have lost interest in X11 as a platform for remote rendering.
- kaba0 4y ago
  You honestly believe that Wayland software are not GPU-accelerated?
  - erik_seaberg 4y ago
    Our datacenters don’t have GPUs, Wayland doesn’t make my desktop’s GPU available to them, and local desktop-only software is getting pretty rare.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      That sound like a self-made problem. There are waypipe and several other options for using the desktop’s resources.
      - erik_seaberg 4y ago
        I was excited about Waypipe until I read that it has to ship compressed pre-rendered video frames over the wire, and all the desktop can do is decompress and composite them. I believe VNC and RDP are much the same, sending bitmaps rather than structured GPU commands from the app. We could expect everyone to start investing in datacenter GPUs, but architecturally “one GPU per display, plugged directly into the display” always made a lot more sense to me.
        kaba0 4y ago
        As mentioned in the thread, X server does the same thing in practice as we are not using XMotif apps anymore with CPU rendering. Icons, textures, all these things will be passed as bitmaps with X remoting, in a strictly worse way than a modern compression could do.

gpm 4y ago

I've used it in the past month to impromptu demonstrate something that I had set up on a GUI app at home (with a lot of dependencies) from my laptop. Yes, it's laggy, but it's nice to have the option, and it's really nice that it's already integrated with ssh and doesn't need extra setup (past passing `-Y` to ssh). If this was the only thing I'd lose by switching window managers it wouldn't be a dealbreaker.

II2II 4y ago

> Have you ever tried this? I've never had X11 network transparency be a good experience. I did, nearly 20 years ago. The computers were over 2500 km apart, though it was over a good university to university connection. The Gimp was certainly usable, though I will not go as far as saying it was good since 20 year old memories can be hazy and the standards of the day are different from the standards of today. I also experimented with X over a 14.4 kbps modem a few years earlier. It was mostly while writing papers (plotting graphs and viewing dvi files, not the actual writing). It was slow, but it got the job done and was better than juggling documents between software on two computers. The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop. All of this remote desktop stuff strikes me as being better suited for accessing a remote system, rather than for running remote software.

kaba0 4y ago
> The one really nice thing about X was the ability to use individual applications across a network connection, rather than dealing with an entire remote desktop That sounds like a UX problem that’s quite trivial to fix, not a technical one and absolutely not inherent with Wayland.
- II2II 4y ago
  If you're talking about shipping a singular rectangular region across the network, possibly. Yet not all windows are rectangular and many applications use more than one window. Then there are issues with how the application interacts with the desktop environment, where the application thinks it is being on computer A when it is actually being displayed on computer B. It is not a trivial UX problem.

erik_seaberg 4y ago

This is what I keep coming back to. A backend that targets Javascript can take advantage of the desktop/laptop GPU. A backend that targets Wayland has to render everything locally in software (no GPU), and nobody I’ve ever worked for wants to build a system that runs this way. Xaw and Motif worked okay, and it’s getting hard to imagine a heavy user who has access to only one computer, yet newer GUI toolkits have lost interest in X11 as a platform for remote rendering.

kaba0 4y ago
You honestly believe that Wayland software are not GPU-accelerated?
- erik_seaberg 4y ago
  Our datacenters don’t have GPUs, Wayland doesn’t make my desktop’s GPU available to them, and local desktop-only software is getting pretty rare.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    That sound like a self-made problem. There are waypipe and several other options for using the desktop’s resources.
    - erik_seaberg 4y ago
      I was excited about Waypipe until I read that it has to ship compressed pre-rendered video frames over the wire, and all the desktop can do is decompress and composite them. I believe VNC and RDP are much the same, sending bitmaps rather than structured GPU commands from the app. We could expect everyone to start investing in datacenter GPUs, but architecturally “one GPU per display, plugged directly into the display” always made a lot more sense to me.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        As mentioned in the thread, X server does the same thing in practice as we are not using XMotif apps anymore with CPU rendering. Icons, textures, all these things will be passed as bitmaps with X remoting, in a strictly worse way than a modern compression could do.