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What's old is new again. How soon until we realize the X window system actually had some good ideas again and start running desktop apps on cloud servers for re

What's old is new again. How soon until we realize the X window system actually had some good ideas again and start running desktop apps on cloud servers for remote work?

erik_seaberg 4y ago
X maintainers are promoting a new platform that doesn’t provide for remote hardware rendering. Ironically, shipping Javascript to a web browser (local to the display) seems to be the way ahead for performance.
paxys 4y ago
It had some good ideas, but that was the extent of it. Every iteration of the solution since then has agreed that streaming all application UI is always going to be janky and needless. It's a lot better to host the data on the server side and let the client handle visual rendering by itself.
- jimmaswell 4y ago
  I used to run Firefox on my Debian server with X tunneling in high school sometimes. It wasn't that bad then and surely it's even better with today's internet.
  - kgxkhxxjbjkv 4y ago
    Firefox is a particularly bad experience over X forwarding these days. Turns out lots of software depends on at least minimal hardware acceleration.
- akvadrako 4y ago
  These days lots of people stream games and CAD sessions over the internet using software like parsec. It works quite well and is often better than the UI running locally on an underpowered GPU.
  - jimmaswell 4y ago
    I heard Stadia was actually pretty good, especially for a game that wasn't super sensitive to fast reactions like RDR2.
    - boppo1 4y ago
      Stadia guy here. There were hiccups, but for the price+convenience, it was awesome.
    - paxys 4y ago
      The tech was by most accounts groundbreaking. The problem was with everything else – business model, pricing, games, customer trust.
      - grogenaut 4y ago
        It wasn't really groundbreaking tech. It's been possible for years, see online. It's just the business model sucks. We did some prototypes in a large company I worked for and it was easy to tell if you could put servers in local data centers with fat pipes it would work. We had demos using ec2 back in 2013. Them we ran the numbers and were like why, esp with free to play becoming more and more of a thing so we canned it. Nvidia had a successful product as well before stadia. Hell I remember reading a use AWS GPU instances as a gaming machine blog posts before stadia.
        dmix 4y ago
        I don’t think Stadia itself was groundbreaking. Xbox cloud worked as good as Stadia. But a few yrs in the big players in the cloud gaming industry figured out some critical latency issues around the controllers and optimizing delivery of the video feed. To the point where lag was almost non-existent on a good fiber connection. The datacenter stuff was obviously the core innovation though. I still prefer to download my Xbox games to my series s/x but I spent a year playing Xbox cloud games exclusively and I could 100% see that being the default for a big part of the casual audience.
  - 4y ago
mhitza 4y ago
I bet on LAN X11 forwarding was pretty sweet, but when I tried it over Wi-Fi/tethering is was pretty janky (and before someone suggests xpra, that wasn't buttery smooth either). But I do like the idea of what X11 forwarding is, better than VNC where whole desktop is shared. I read that on Windows RDP can "stream" only the window, whereas on Linux the implementation is full desktop only? (please correct me if I'm wrong cause I would love to tunnel apps from servers).
- wbkang 4y ago
  Honestly, I think xpra is probably the best open solution you will find. It does have (too) many knobs to configure so it takes time to try out different codecs and settings to find a sweet spot using their session info toolset. And the mailing list is very helpful. For example, if bandwidth is plenty, you can use the straight RGB encoding and it performs well. Turning on audio can have effect on your latency as well.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > "stream" only the window I mean, that is a thing xpra can do. Or, x11vnc can do it with some hoop-jumping.
- stryan 4y ago
  IIRC, part of the problem is X11 forwarding works best when the software is using raw X primitives (someone can correct my terminology if I'm wrong) because then X11 can just send draw commands. Both GTK and Qt don't use the X11 primitives so instead the server has to send entire pixel buffers, which is naturally a lot slower.
mariusmg 4y ago
>start running desktop apps on cloud servers for remote work Hopefully never.

What's old is new again. How soon until we realize the X window system actually had some good ideas again and start running desktop apps on cloud servers for remote work?

erik_seaberg 4y ago

X maintainers are promoting a new platform that doesn’t provide for remote hardware rendering. Ironically, shipping Javascript to a web browser (local to the display) seems to be the way ahead for performance.

paxys 4y ago

It had some good ideas, but that was the extent of it. Every iteration of the solution since then has agreed that streaming all application UI is always going to be janky and needless. It's a lot better to host the data on the server side and let the client handle visual rendering by itself.

jimmaswell 4y ago
I used to run Firefox on my Debian server with X tunneling in high school sometimes. It wasn't that bad then and surely it's even better with today's internet.
- kgxkhxxjbjkv 4y ago
  Firefox is a particularly bad experience over X forwarding these days. Turns out lots of software depends on at least minimal hardware acceleration.
akvadrako 4y ago
These days lots of people stream games and CAD sessions over the internet using software like parsec. It works quite well and is often better than the UI running locally on an underpowered GPU.
- jimmaswell 4y ago
  I heard Stadia was actually pretty good, especially for a game that wasn't super sensitive to fast reactions like RDR2.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    Stadia guy here. There were hiccups, but for the price+convenience, it was awesome.
  - paxys 4y ago
    The tech was by most accounts groundbreaking. The problem was with everything else – business model, pricing, games, customer trust.
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      It wasn't really groundbreaking tech. It's been possible for years, see online. It's just the business model sucks. We did some prototypes in a large company I worked for and it was easy to tell if you could put servers in local data centers with fat pipes it would work. We had demos using ec2 back in 2013. Them we ran the numbers and were like why, esp with free to play becoming more and more of a thing so we canned it. Nvidia had a successful product as well before stadia. Hell I remember reading a use AWS GPU instances as a gaming machine blog posts before stadia.
      - dmix 4y ago
        I don’t think Stadia itself was groundbreaking. Xbox cloud worked as good as Stadia. But a few yrs in the big players in the cloud gaming industry figured out some critical latency issues around the controllers and optimizing delivery of the video feed. To the point where lag was almost non-existent on a good fiber connection. The datacenter stuff was obviously the core innovation though. I still prefer to download my Xbox games to my series s/x but I spent a year playing Xbox cloud games exclusively and I could 100% see that being the default for a big part of the casual audience.
- 4y ago

mhitza 4y ago

I bet on LAN X11 forwarding was pretty sweet, but when I tried it over Wi-Fi/tethering is was pretty janky (and before someone suggests xpra, that wasn't buttery smooth either). But I do like the idea of what X11 forwarding is, better than VNC where whole desktop is shared. I read that on Windows RDP can "stream" only the window, whereas on Linux the implementation is full desktop only? (please correct me if I'm wrong cause I would love to tunnel apps from servers).

wbkang 4y ago
Honestly, I think xpra is probably the best open solution you will find. It does have (too) many knobs to configure so it takes time to try out different codecs and settings to find a sweet spot using their session info toolset. And the mailing list is very helpful. For example, if bandwidth is plenty, you can use the straight RGB encoding and it performs well. Turning on audio can have effect on your latency as well.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> "stream" only the window I mean, that is a thing xpra can do. Or, x11vnc can do it with some hoop-jumping.
stryan 4y ago
IIRC, part of the problem is X11 forwarding works best when the software is using raw X primitives (someone can correct my terminology if I'm wrong) because then X11 can just send draw commands. Both GTK and Qt don't use the X11 primitives so instead the server has to send entire pixel buffers, which is naturally a lot slower.

mariusmg 4y ago

>start running desktop apps on cloud servers for remote work Hopefully never.