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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

What percent of Linux users do you think would ever use software this way? What percent of all "desktop" OS users would ever use software this way? It seems like an extremely niche and rare use case and probably not the right thing to target for the main desktop environment.

I've been using Linux as my main OS for ~12 years now. I have personally never wanted to do anything like that. For remote software, I would prefer a web UI or a VNC/remote-desktop tool.

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X-forwarding (over ssh, or directly like this person is doing) is extremely useful and powerful. I use it this way, and I know plenty of people that do too. On top of that, wayland doesn't solve any problems that I have, so there's your data point.

Sure, but my guess is that <1% of Linux users currently use X forwarding, and probably <0.01% of desktop OS users would ever want something like this. It's a cool feature that should exist, but rare enough that it doesn't need to be fundamental to desktop architecture.

Using a wayland desktop, remote login into a Linux server, start a graphical text editor like gvim, it fails. This is a very common way to dev on Linux, I too have been doing this daily, and with ssh+X11 it works out of the box. I wonder what is the best way to do this with Wayland. Should I ask an admin to reconfigure the remote server to run a VNC or RDP server, and then use a specific tool to connect? I wonder if VNC/RDP can integrate apps as windows instead of all-in-one window.

I do something similar with vim, no gui. I use vim over ssh with tmux. Others I know use vs code with an ssh backend. These two make up the workflow of roughly 60000 Googlers. None of them need X forwarding.

Some people may benefit from X forwarding, but the vast majority of Linux users do not.

Your colleagues don't need X forwarding, so requirements from people that are not in the vast majority don't need to be addressed, they'll just have to use RDP/VNC even if it's a step backwards for them. Fortunately X11 is open source, so life can continue for those of us who need it.

Same at FB - vscode with ssh backend is the recommendation, ssh+vim works perfectly fine; last time I checked X forwarding did work, but even with a multi-gigabit connection and 20ms latency it was too painful so nobody did that...

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