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Comment by jluxenberg | Hacker News Reader

Does no one else ever use X applications over an SSH tunnel? It's an easy way to, for example, control the music playing on my Linux box hooked up to my stereo system.

In all the blog posts about replacing X, I don't see anyone even mentioning this feature of X. Or if they do, they say that its an irrelevant feature.

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In all the threads I've read about Wayland, there's been considerable hyperventilation about loss of network transparency along with assurances that those concerns would be easier to deal with in a post-X world; basically, that the people working in these problems weren't born yesterday.

For example, read the whole of this thread: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-November...

Except that the "assurances" are wrong:

(1) They refer to vaporware features that the upstream developers have explicitly rejected: seriously, read the upstream mailing list.

(2) They refer to a two-tier world where some old X apps will still work remotely, while all new apps won't work.

(3) They refer to VNC and RDP as acceptable alternatives, even though these are inferior because they forward the whole desktop, require you to install and run an entire desktop on your remote server, refer to vaporware rootless RDP which doesn't exist on Linux, and don't deal with trivial items like pixel-size incompatibility between server and client.

RDP has included the ability to forward individual windows. RDP also includes a lot of capabilities that (as far as I can tell) X11 doesn't like bidirectional audio redirection, redirection of local hard drivers, printers, etc.

Frankly, the user experience for remote desktop and remote application access with more recent versions of RDP (in Win2008, etc) is vastly superior to what's currently available for remote desktop and/or application access in Linux.

Now admittedly, I don't know of an RDP server for Wayland that implements those features (or any RDP server for Wayland really). But given that Wayland is still fairly young that's not surprising. There's certainly no compelling reason why a good RDP server can't be written for Wayland.

Have you taken a look at mpd and its accompanying CLI frontends? Tunneling X applications over SSH isn't popular because there's almost always a CLI application that accomplishes the same thing.

Apparently VNC does it better. And most X apps these days use D-Bus for communication anyway, so you can't run those over a network link.

D-Bus is a cancer of the Linux desktop.

That just means D-Bus was a big mistake. I've looked at the implementation, and that's a mistake on many levels too.

I do quite frequently for various reasons. It would be disappointing to lose it, but at the same time, I still want to see X go.

Perhaps the future tool will have a way to push ui data over the network, as well, and we won't lose those abilities.

Reading email in my work PC with my work PC software from my home PC, or burning a DVD on my mediacenter from my netbook.

A pair of commands as glue and a simple icon in the lauch bar can do marbelous things... I hope they find a way to get that features back.

I have only ever used X over ssh, at least as far as running applications remotely. Particularly when I'm on a windows box - putty + Xming is fantastic.

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