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Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

I think these modern TUIs are a testament to the general failure of modern GUIs.

It's not like they're particularly easier to write these.

But since there's no remote GUI option, much less a portable remote GUI option, particularly one that's not just a video of an entire desktop, we're stuck with these.

WHo wants to fire up an entire desktop to get open a simple utility app?

Obviously the Web satisfies much of the demand for this, but clearly not all.

Remote X is, essentially, dead. It's obviously "really hard", since "no one does that any more". Or, folks just don't miss having rootless windows peering into their remote server enclaves.

It's just too bad, full circle, here we are again. "Progress."

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Failure of Linux Desktop you mean.

RDP works great and GUI tooling for Windows and macOS is quite comparable to using VB, Delphi, Smalltalk like experiences.

X could do that before RDP was even a project. I think OP is meaning something different.

Of course it could, it is essentially dead, because hardly anyone still does X remoting, and Wayland doesn't support it.

Ironically these days the built-in "remote desktop" feature in Gnome is literally RDP.

Not really ironic. The GNOME team are mostly paid by the same company as the Wayland team (and the Flatpak team and the OStree team and the systemd team) and that team wants to replace X.org with its own new tool.

I said "ironically" because it also works much better than X remoting, or for that matter VNC. Which isn't really new, it's just amusing to see this finally acknowledged by desktop Linux.

RDP works great on Linux as well. The problem isn't remote access, it is lack of good cross platform GUIs. There is a reason browsers are dominating the UI space and TUIs are popular.

Yeah, laziness, we had plenty or cross platform GUIs in the 1990's.

Qt is still around. And there's stuff like Avalonia.

The problem is that people don't use that and reach for Electron instead, and then you get that "bad on any platform (but good enough to ship)" effect.

There are no failures for Linux Desktop; this can never be the meaning. I say this with humor in mind.

Requiring me to have a cloud account to format my machine (mac) and requiring me to have a cloud account on only pre-authorized hardware (Windows 11), only to open up Notepad and see they slapped AI inside of it; now that is quite comparable to me slapping Linux on it.

Just sayin'

You don’t need any kind of account to erase a Mac.

ssh -X also works great.

> But since there's no remote GUI option

ssh -X and waypipe both work perfectly fine.

And to your point about portability, if you're stuck on an OS other than Linux, VNC/RDP aren't pretty but they'll get the job done.

> And to your point about portability, if you're stuck on a non-linux OS, VNC/RDP aren't pretty but they'll get the job done.

If you can make them working. Sorry you can't connect if user is logged on this computer. Whoops RDP session is active, so I will show you this black screen after typing your username and password until user disconnects (Why not kick out the user?). VNC is even bigger pain when you need to boot up server from SSH and sometimes restart it when it gets stuck.

While on Windows you can just install TightVNC and it works. No screwing with screens. On MacOS you can just tick Remote Screen Sharing, put your VNC password and it just works. Even Android can do that droidVNC-NG, But Linux is such a PITA to make VNC or RDP working.

And RDP also assumes that you are running X11 and not Wayland.

> I will show you this black screen

Right, that's why I said RDP isn't pretty if you aren't on Linux. Windows insists on creating a separate desktop for each session. IIRC it has something to do with licensing, they don't like simultaneous users using one Windows license.

> While on Windows you can just install TightVNC and it works.

If you're resorting to installing third-party apps, you can install TightVNC on Linux too, and it just works. Though I found krfb performs better on my network, ymmv.

> And RDP also assumes that you are running X11 and not Wayland.

RDP is just a protocol that describes the bytes going over the network. Why would it care about your display server? There are VNC and RDP servers for both X11 and Wayland. Just install one that's supported by your system.

Though if you're on linux, you don't have to deal with the VNC/RDP jank at all. Just use ssh -X or waypipe and it's way snappier.

I use ssh -X all the time (actually I have -X permanently enabled so it's always there - for the targets where I want to use it). However, if there's any combination of latency and heavy X traffic (which can be found in surprising places), ssh doesn't cut it. Then a VNC is necessary. The difference can be as much as ten minutes of waiting for the GUI to come up, or nearly instantly if I have a VNC running.

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