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Comment by alexchamberlain | Hacker News Reader

Did you use SSH with X forwarding though?

X protocol remoting is almost never what you want; with the client / server relationship swapped, all[1] the apps that you're running die once you disconnect. If you assume unreliable networking - not rare at all in many remote work scenarios - it's a recipe for frustration.

[1] Yes, I know there are exceptions.

Please don't tell me what I "almost never want", considering it's a feature that I do use all the time. My LAN is quite reliable and fast, thanks very much.

It's not that everybody almost never wants it, it's that almost nobody ever wants it.

+1 ... X protocol remoting is amazing.

Amazing until a connection times out and apps close without being resumable

On a LAN this doesn't happen unless the power goes down.

Doesn't happen with NX.

Probably should have been "almost never what one wants," but that's quibbling over English. Even if it were true that there were no mechanism for doing remoting on Wayland (which isn't the case; remoting just moves to a separate layer in the stack, as handled by NX or VNC or whatever), it would still be a reasonable sacrifice, because it's not what most users want. Doing X remoting is the exception, not the rule, and there's no reason for the *nix world to get stuck in the Windows mentality of having to be backwards-compatible with every application and protocol written since the dawn of time. Having a huge networking layer shoved into the middle of the display stack has measurable costs in terms of both maintainability and performance, and users that have any use case other than yours suffer as a result. Android, which is now the most-installed Linux "distribution" (such as it is) ever, had to invent its own display layer because X was a terrifying, bloated hacktastrophe, and they come up with something specific to their platform such that now no other Linux users can benefit from any of their display work. That sucks. Keeping network transparency as a core feature doesn't pass the cost-benefit smell test.

Well, having spend all my day on an Xterminal, I think you are stuck in Windows mentality. Unix mentality is network transparency. Just inform you about plan9. In unix, you do not care where your program is running, it just runs and you can interact with it on your X server. VNC is windows mentality and it just happen to be useful on unix because X toolkit layers are network hogs.

I haven't owned or operated a Windows machine in almost a decade, and have ten terminal tabs open as we speak; pretty sure my Unix cred is intact, thanks. And I thought the Unix philosophy was to do one thing and do it well (Wikipedia agrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_way#McIlroy:_A_Quarter_Cen... ). Separating the thing that paints the screen from the thing that pushes pixels over the network seems in perfect keeping with this philosophy. Bash isn't network-transparent; if you want to use it over a network, you use SSH.

Bash is network transparent: you change directory in a nfs filesystem or in a curlftpfs the same way as on a local disk.

X separates the thing that paints the screen (the X server) from the things that computes (the X client).

Your idea or pushing pixels means that you need a virtual screen on the machine where programs runs and you want to copy this virtual screen to your screen. Do you imagine the complexity of window management with such a setup ? Have you already launched many VNC clients at the same time ?

X over SSH in my experience is much harder to configure, and slower

Some people claim it depends on adequately configuring X, which may be true, but it's much easier to configure VNC over SSH to have an acceptable performance

I think the main argument for remote X is that it is so easy to use between 2 true X11 environments. You just `ssh -X` to your target and start running programs.

On Windows or OSX though... If you were going to install X11 why not skip it and just install VNC?

Maybe I don't want to run a full X session on my remote machine, just to run a simple X client and have it displayed on my local desktop?

VNC is no alternative for running individual applications remotely. Remote desktop != remote X.

True, for one app, ssh -X is usually better

Still, most of the time, running only one application is not the usage model. Or it's a simple thing that doesn't need X, just ssh

Remote desktop allows remoting only single applications, though. That's how stuff like the XP mode with Virtual PC on Windows 7 works.

That's exactly what 'ssh -X' is for.

(But tastes much better as 'ssh -XC')

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