Comment by destructionator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by destructionator | Hacker News Reader

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destructionator

> 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.

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