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Comment by linuxandrew | Hacker News Reader

Network transparency doesn't offer any tangible benefits for a lot of apps and desktop environments because they are drawn with bitmaps and textures rather than vectors.

This topic has been done to death for the past decade. VNC and RDP won. X11 was a razor edge case and nothing more.

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Yet network transparency was the whole point of (and whole reason for the complex byzantine architecture of) X11. So you have to pay the full expensive complexity and asynchronous distributed api tax, and you still have to reimplement half-assed virtual desktop network transparency at another layer.

X11 just had a different usecase. It was not meant for internet but for many terminals on the local network. Hence the proto design which didn't consider latency a potential problem.

ssh -X is still easier and lighter weight that running a VNC server on any machine I need to run a GUI though.

Incidentally at $CURRENT_JOB this happens very often: when WFH, I RDP to a windows machine, form which I VNC to a unix xvnc box form which I ssh -x to my actual dev box. It is amazing that it works at all and it is quite usable!

For running individual applications over the network, Waypipe might be the way to go, though I haven't tried it.

It is very convenient indeed. No doubt about that part. But it’s not like it’s impossible to find viable alternatives.

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