Mutter: a window manager for GNOME 3 [LWN.net]

Mutter: a window manager for GNOME 3

Posted Aug 7, 2009 4:48 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
Parent article: Mutter: a window manager for GNOME 3

I'm really concerned about the effect of this on remote desktops (over remote X11, NX, or VNC/RFB).

Remote clients increasingly seem to be being forgotten, to the point where I recently had to track down a bug in Evolution (actually turned out to be in gtk) that caused "reply" and "new mail" windows to take MINUTES to appear on remote X11 displays.

When people _do_ examine remote desktops, they seem to assume the remote desktop machine is a grunty desktop that just happens to be running remote X - not a Via C7 or the like as is often really the case. Hardware accelerated 3D and fast CPUs are NOT guaranteed in distributed client environments.

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Mutter: a window manager for GNOME 3

Posted Aug 7, 2009 19:21 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

Most X terminals had to run a local window manager. I remember back with twm on 10 Mbit Ethernet and some kind of X terminal ... NEC I think it was.

It had twm in ROM.

Running a remote window manager sucked quite a lot as I recall.

So if you run Mutter on your local system it should display remote applications just fine, I would think. Assuming that Gnome can still handle a half-local, half-remote configuration.

Mutter: a window manager for GNOME 3

Posted Aug 8, 2009 1:37 UTC (Sat) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

These days you generally use XDMCP to initiate a session and run *all* clients remotely, from the WM on up. Many X11 thin clients are netbooted minimalist compact PCs (mini-ITX or the like) with no HDD. Canned setups are offered by LTSP and the like.

Remote WMs work pretty well - with modern WMs like Metacity at least. In fact, they're pretty strongly preferable because of all the GNOME communication stuff that happens via D-BUS, gconf, etc rather than X11.

Even if Mutter was to be run locally, though, that doesn't change the fact that you're often talking about a 700MHz Via C7 (or even a 500MHz C3) system that while it supports insanely fast hardware crypto doesn't have any hardware 3D support.