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Comment by vetinari | Hacker News Reader

1) no, he complains that X11 has a big core and then extensions. Extensions are fine, but they were unable to kick out parts of the core, because it is the core and something somewhere assumes it is there. So they had to maintain it, despite not being used in practice, except by that little something that nobody can point their fingers at.

2) he talks about obsolete hardware. There's no really a point to support s3 trio, at the expense of support for modern hardware, which works ink wastly different way.

3) That graceful degradation is in practice the same, as just using Wayland. Ever tried to use modern X11 app over network? RDP is vastly better experience, (and RDP support is wip in wayland).

4) This is so wrong so I won't even react to it.

5) Wayland calls do not wait for reply. You rapid fire requests and then collect responses as they come. Heck, you can even get a response you didn't ask for ;)

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> That graceful degradation is in practice the same, as just using Wayland. Ever tried to use modern X11 app over network? RDP is vastly better experience, (and RDP support is wip in wayland).

I do, in fact, use modern X11 apps over the network literally every day. Some are better than others - if the programmer made the effort to actually gracefully degrade it can be a considerably better experience than the ones who just shoot a constant stream of bitmaps down the wire (which do work better on rdp, i remember once upon a time, I'd ssh to my linux box and set up port forwarding to a windows box on my lan so i can remote desktop to it, then run Xming from there... which is absurd that that actually worked better), but if you do it well, remote X is very nice to use.

The seamless integration of windows from multiple computers is a thing to behold. Remote Desktop is great and I like a lot about it, but even the "Seamless" rdp doesn't work as nice as X.

If you don't mind answering, what do you do that uses GUI over network? Not looking to argue or try to claim <something> would work better or anything, just curious what people use it for seriously these days.

One common example is running data analysis/reduction remotely on a big fast box and then looking at the products on that machine via X11 forwarding. On a fast low-latency connection there is hardly any noticeable difference between running the application locally or remotely (it's just another window locally opposed to another window in another desktop in a window).

I use tons of things on it. When I use my laptop, often I'll run a local browser (though sometimes I run remote browsers too - Chromium's core works actually surprisingly well on a remote X link - but the bigger problem there is that chromium doesn't support multiple instances, so if I left the browser open on the desktop, the cookies and history aren't shared on the remote instance on the laptop which defeats the purpose of reusing the instance anyway, but sometimes the shared passwords still nice to have) with most everything else being run remote.

Among the specific applications are my developer tools, image viewers, music editors, the apps I'm actually working on, etc. Of course, some of these also work fine on ssh terminals and I do plenty of that too, but there's just no need to be limited and I'll run whatever I want to.

The last time I had to use remote X11, it was to run Oracle's dbca. Everything else was possible to do in some other way, usually more comfortable.

RDP does support integration of windows from multiple computers, in a way of RemoteApps. Even if you are running GUI apps inside WSL2 locally, you are using it.

I was about say, literally WHAT? x2go destroys every other solution I've ever tried for this.

> he complains that X11 has a big core and then extensions. Extensions are fine, but they were unable to kick out parts of the core, because it is the core and something somewhere assumes it is there.

The thing that I find ridiculous about this attitude is that you have two choices:

1) Remove parts of the core that some (mostly old, unmaintained) applications rely on, which will break them. You'd probably have to call it "X12" now, but that's fine: most X11 applications would continue to work with no (or very few) modifications.

2) Throw out the entire system and build a new one from scratch, that literally no applications will work on until new toolkit backends are written and some applications themselves are rewritten or at least fixed up. Those same old, possibly unmaintained apps that would stop working in #1 are still not working, but now it's along with literally everything else too.

> RDP support is wip in wayland

If I had a dollar for every time I heard "$IMPORTANT_FEATURE is WIP in Wayland", I'd be able to get several pizzas delivered.

3) Build a new system that supports the old system reasonably well and doesn't prevent people using and improving the old system until the new one meets their needs.

> If I had a dollar for every time I heard "$IMPORTANT_FEATURE is WIP in Wayland", I'd be able to get several pizzas delivered.

It's true though there have been features missing. It's good thing that they are being worked on though, no? The X protocol and the Xorg implementation are both abandonware, so your comment comes across as positive, because missing $IMPORTANT_FEATURE in X/Xorg is not WIP.

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