Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

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Xwindow system is fantastic in its design. One have to put the mindset when X window system was designed CPU, memory was very expensive so the best thing was to share resources with colleauges. Thus in the 80s Dos, digital eqipment Wax mainframes, 90s you had PCs with spinning disks running Windows.

X and here is the power of allows you to run graphical windows created from another computer. Much like you can use ssh and pipewire to commect to remote hosts and send sound over the network. X allows you to send graphical windows over the network.

"Network Transparency:

X was designed to work seamlessly over a network, allowing applications (clients) running on one machine to display their GUI on another machine's screen (the server). This feature enables users to work with remote applications as if they were running locally."

Moden operating systems still dont quite have the render remote GUI operating system windows like local Applications. Yes there is server side rendering of web apps but not for whole native operating system windows.

There is beaty in the design philosophy of Xwindows.

But network transparency has not been true since forever — unless you are using XMotif, almost every framework renders using the GPU, so you end up transporting a bunch of pixel data slowly over the wire — VNCs are much better at this problem then the naive approach.

There is a beauty to its design, but it longer fits the current model - if you are really looking for the legacy of its design, it would probably be the web — thin clients rendering based on short instructions emitted by remote computers.

> so you end up transporting a bunch of pixel data slowly over the wire — VNCs are much better at this problem then the naive approach

This technically correct caveat, which keeps coming up, is technically correct, but IMHO misses the point. This limited form of network transparency (it's not like pixels are slowly pushed out-of-band, you're still doing that over X) is not the most suitable solution to this problem, but how fast you're pushing frames isn't the only relevant metric.

This is slow in principle but still fast enough for most local networks. But more importantly, unlike with any VNC out there:

* It takes zero time to set up. If you have SSH setup on the server, all you need to turn it into a poor man's version of VNC is to flip the X forwarding flag. There are no additional packages to install and no services to manage besides what you're probably already using (SSH).

* It doesn't introduce an additional account management layer (no vncpasswd madness, no syncing between AD and VNC accounts and dealing with the breakage that happens when that inevitably breaks, no cloud credentials). Account and key management are easy (and you're probably doing it already!). If you need to change laptops, you just change laptops and take the keys with you -- it still takes zero time to setup.

* Even though you're just slowly pushing pixels over the wire, remote applications remain manageable by the local window manager. You don't Alt-Tab between your windows and a window with all your other windows or deal with wonky attempts to use a "rootless" VNC display mode (e.g. different keyboard maps)

Pushing pixels is certainly slow but, if you're doing it over a contemporary local network, it's fast enough and in my obviously subjective experience a way better than any VNC I've used. X-based (-ish) solutions like xpra or x2go, which still mostly push pixels, slowly, are so much better it's not even funny. Not good, mind you, there hasn't been a good experience in this field in forever, but still much closer to seamlessly using local and remote applications than any cross-platform VNC around.

> if you're doing it over a contemporary local network, it's fast enough and in my obviously subjective experience a way better than any VNC I've used.

Windows Remote Desktop configured to use h.264 hardware encoding is light years better than any VNC or remote X Windows I've ever used. Everything looks perfect, reacts instantly at 60 fps, and doesn't use more bandwidth than streaming a movie - even if you're playing a movie.

Fullscreen it's actually like being at the other computer and it's unparalleled by any Mac or Linux built-in screen sharing.

> Windows Remote Desktop configured to use h.264 hardware encoding

And when h.264 hardware encoding is not available ?

> And when h.264 hardware encoding is not available ?

It's still orders of magnitude better than X over network, in my personal experience.

I used to watch videos over RDP served from a 300MHz Pentium II with a graphics card from back when having hardware MPEG2 decoding was special. Even today using X applications from my Ryzen 1600X server on my Ryzen 3900X desktop over a direct 40G ethernet link is jankier than RDP was 20 years ago.

X's network transparency is occasionally really useful, but there are newer and better ways to solve this problem. The way it does things made sense for the world it was developed in where asking the host to maintain a framebuffer would have been a massive waste of resources, but those resources are now plentiful.

First, you can simply not use trash frameworks and get better results.

But more importantly, drawing pixels is just one part of a gui and focusing on that without considering the other parts hurts. I've been testing input devices on remote X lately: using programs on my desktop on an old laptop with a touchscreen and a drawing tablet and all kinds of other gadgets. It has different input methods than the client computer. They all just work remotely too, with full capability. Things like copy/paste and drag+drop just working between windows, regardless of where they are running, and integration with local window management is a huge benefit, you can forget these random programs actually run somewhere else. It feels like there's no barrier.

It's funny to see today's web being called a "thin" client.

> digital eqipment Wax mainframes

I think they have one at Madame Tussauds computer museum.

> Thus in the 80s Dos, digital eqipment Wax mainframes, 90s you had PCs with spinning disks running Windows.

Given the dead-simple effectiveness of Hacker News UI, my major obstacle to usability is autocorrect in the face of technical argot.

So I try my best to decode the nonsense. Despite heroic fights against autocorrect, some of my well-crafted comments are risible nonsense.

"Thus in the 80s [Microsoft] DOS, Digital Equipment [Corporation (DEC)] VAX mainframes, 90s you had PCs with spinning disks running Windows..."

Oh, I knew what the GP meant to type. I was just enjoying the typo.

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