Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

that's bullshit. I use Qt apps and they are still in 2022 able to use X11 paint commands to render over the network in a way that is much, much, much more fluid than e.g. rdp, vnc or whatever other bullshit like that. Many GTK apps also seem to work fine (though not all, Geany is snappy while Gimp isn't for instance)

see how it looks: https://streamable.com/t9foij

View on HN

> much more fluid than e.g. rdp, vnc or whatever

RDP also sends draw calls, and as such cannot be compared to VNC or similar. It's not even a remotely close comparison in terms of fluidity. I haven't compared it to Qt over X11, but I wouldn't be surprised if RDP wins over an internet link.

The lack of a proper RDP alternative is the primary reason I don't use Linux as my main driver. I keep checking every 12 months or so, but alas.

> RDP also sends draw calls

on linux with native linux apps ?

I haven't checked in a few years, but I imagine they haven't implemented that yet given how tightly RDP draw calls maps to the GDI.

Point was that RDP in its natural environment can forward draw calls, and as such is more like X than VNC.

Don't forget NX protocol. It's far more faster and lightweight that VNC/RDP.

As far as I know NX is just a layer of compression on top of the X11 protocols though, e.g. it uses zlib for compressing paths, jpeg for compressing pixmaps, etc.. Not sure it'd actually help that much on gigabit ethernet.

One part of it (the NXagent) is centered on reducing round-trips rather than compressing the protocol. May not be worth on low-latency links but it is a deal-killer in high-latency ones.

RDP is far, far more advanced than X11. In addition to doing "GDI over the wire" much like X11's draw calls, RDP supports compressed bitmaps and streaming video, remote audio, remote file system, remote USB, clipboard sharing, and more recently remote GPU. (Yes, I know about GLX, it's incredibly old and hasn't been updated.)

RDP is to X as PowerShell is to bash: better than the Unix standard thing because it isn't weighed down by Unix community baggage.

Eh, no. PowerShell is trash. And instead of Bash I prefer ksh and for anything more complex, perl, which curb-stomps PowerShell by large.

Also, you were right on RDP, but something less is more.

If any, I prefer plan9/9front's drawterm/cpu which runs circles over Unix/Linux VNC and RDP. By a huge mile.

And 9p>>>>>>>> NFS/SMB. For anything else, use FS' permissions FFS, and choose wisely what you share.

Powershell is not at all trash. Being object oriented makes it very easy to do on the fly inspection of your data and allows extremely powerful pipelining. If you want even more functionality, you can load in .NET libraries at runtime. Working with Powershell really feels like working with Python but using a different syntax.

You have PERL REPLs like that with Task::Kensho leaving out PSH and .Net libraries on the dust.

What you could do today with PSH and iPython Perl folks did that before with far more modules thanks to CPAN and C bindings.

> If any, I prefer plan9/9front's drawterm/cpu which runs circles over Unix/Linux VNC and RDP. By a huge mile.

How can this [1] code possibly be faster than modern hardware accelerated blitting? I don't see a line of SIMD in there.

[1]: https://github.com/9fans/drawterm/blob/master/libmemdraw/dra...

Call me odd, but 9front on native machines looks smoother than most composited desktops here.

composited WMs are so frustrating to use when you're used to non-composited

GLX is not much older than RDP and has also been updated several times.

I assume you use it through a local network where it will be reasonably fast. But then please compare it with any sort of “modern” video streaming approach on the same network as well.

here's the exact same case with VNC, on the same network: even with the smaller resolution and lossy image compression, VNC manages to be quite slower than X11

https://streamable.com/50fdss

I tried steamlink on the same network to put games on my TV, and it is barely useable with absolutely horrendous image compression (got a GTX1080 GPU so that's likely not the culprit)

Note that Qt5 does not send paint commands by default, it sends bitmaps. You need a special env var to revert to drawing commands.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com