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Multi-user graphical computing seems to forever sit just outside the more common use case lexicon. Being able to ask another machine to run something and displ

Multi-user graphical computing seems to forever sit just outside the more common use case lexicon. Being able to ask another machine to run something and display it where you are is a seriously great feature. These days I have largely given up. Too many just don't see it. Sad day. One of my favorite X11 setups was engineering CAD software for about 30 users. I had a beefy SGI running the program and data management system. No user could ever touch that data except through the program. Better, the data goes where it is supposed to go with the user more concerned with just doing the work with few worries. One happy side effect was users were largely free to run what they wanted as their desktop computer. As long as a respectable X server was available for their machine, they were good to go.

jameshart 3y ago
You’re aware that web browsers have filled that role pretty effectively, right?
- ddingus 3y ago
  Sort of. Having run high 3nd X CAD modeling applications on SGI, for example, browser stuff seems clunky and anything really performant seems to load executables locally. That said, yes! Browsers act a lot like X servers do. What I am getting at here is not entirely a technical problem. Most computers offered a single user, eventually multi tasking graphical environment. The computers running a well implemented X window system offered multi user graphical computing. It could and often was run as a single user graphical environment too. X had everything compartmentalized, and that allowed a sysadmin to set the computing up any way that made sense. Once, just for fun, I had one machine serving up fonts, another doing window management, yet another serving the graphics to the user, another one sharing files to another one running the application! 5 machines all contributing to any number of graphical users, and in my toy, fun case, that was two users. One user was me, and I was using an sgi, and the other Windows 2000. Was kind of fun to see their face as the familiar application looked the same on his windows box as it did on IRIX Two clicks on an icon, or a command given and "the application" happened on whatever machine was serving up graphics.
- cduzz 3y ago
  Indeed -- web browsers are very comparable to X -- especially with things like web sockets or streaming media. Which is why I offered that the question "what process is generating my window" is comparable to "what is the PID of the process that generated this HTTPs response?"
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    I feel that using a browser with cloud shell alongside some cloud instances is a time travel to how I was doing development on the university computing center and my years of dotcom wave. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

jameshart 3y ago

You’re aware that web browsers have filled that role pretty effectively, right?

ddingus 3y ago
Sort of. Having run high 3nd X CAD modeling applications on SGI, for example, browser stuff seems clunky and anything really performant seems to load executables locally. That said, yes! Browsers act a lot like X servers do. What I am getting at here is not entirely a technical problem. Most computers offered a single user, eventually multi tasking graphical environment. The computers running a well implemented X window system offered multi user graphical computing. It could and often was run as a single user graphical environment too. X had everything compartmentalized, and that allowed a sysadmin to set the computing up any way that made sense. Once, just for fun, I had one machine serving up fonts, another doing window management, yet another serving the graphics to the user, another one sharing files to another one running the application! 5 machines all contributing to any number of graphical users, and in my toy, fun case, that was two users. One user was me, and I was using an sgi, and the other Windows 2000. Was kind of fun to see their face as the familiar application looked the same on his windows box as it did on IRIX Two clicks on an icon, or a command given and "the application" happened on whatever machine was serving up graphics.
cduzz 3y ago
Indeed -- web browsers are very comparable to X -- especially with things like web sockets or streaming media. Which is why I offered that the question "what process is generating my window" is comparable to "what is the PID of the process that generated this HTTPs response?"
- pjmlp 3y ago
  I feel that using a browser with cloud shell alongside some cloud instances is a time travel to how I was doing development on the university computing center and my years of dotcom wave. The more things change, the more they stay the same.