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LPC: Life after XLPC: Life after XPosted Nov 7, 2010 20:00 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753)In reply to: LPC: Life after X by drag Parent article: LPC: Life after X Windows and OS X users can use X remotely just as about as much as we can with Linux. They both can even host X clients... but you have to realize the fact that almost nobody does that may help indicate how little utility most people get from X Windows networking. That is because using remote X11 apps on Windows (I have no Mac experiences) is highly painful, compared to doing the same thing on Linux. There are just too many impedance mismatches with the native window system, and you need add the huge X11 server software. I expect the same thing would happen on Linux with a non-X11 "native" window system. Remote X11 (or running legacy X11 apps locally) would get a lot less convenient.
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LPC: Life after X Posted Nov 8, 2010 5:04 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
Well, there is one fundamental reason why it might turn out differently: If the folks who most recently maintained X develop its successor with bridging from X in mind, it's more likely to be seamless.
Bridging from X was never a design goal of Windows or MacOS.
LPC: Life after X Posted Nov 8, 2010 9:31 UTC (Mon) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link] I'm not so sanguine about compatibility: we're talking about people who simply deny the existence of legitimate user requirements like network transparency. It'd be a small step for them to simply deny that users need to run X programs as well. Hopefully, they'll just be ignored. People have been trying to replace X for decades but nothing's taken off yet. I see no reason why this effort would succeed where previous ones failed.
LPC: Life after X Posted Nov 8, 2010 10:01 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] People have been trying to replace X for decades but nothing's taken off yet. Hmmm.... I believe X has probably 1% - 2% share in graphical desktops across all computers. Just because nothing's displaced it in the UNIX/Linux space doesn't mean it's a model of wild success writ large. And that's more than adequate to explain the lack of attention X usability / compatibility / impedance matching gets from the Windows and Mac crowds. It's not surprising X clients don't interoperate well with the native environment in those worlds. Given then fact that Wayland's coming from within the 1% - 2% community gives me at least some hope that they actually understand how X gets used and how to make it work and work well. As to the network transparency debate: There seems to be multiple levels here, and it all gets oversimplified when people fixate on the fact that local clients are the default focus of Wayland. There's the X way of doing things, which everyone is comfortable with inasmuch as they have programs that use it that they rely on and that they know work. At the far other end of the spectrum are windowing environments that offer no remote access model. These are an endangered species. And in between we have a number of different options, ranging from NX, which apparently keeps the drawing-primitive flavor of X with a lot of other improvements, to VNC/RDP, which move more in the bitmap-drawing direction. Personally, I'm still not 100% sold on the network transparency at the graphic-primitive level. Nothing in Wayland seems to truly get in the way of network transparency, as long as you're comfortable with a rendered-bitmap level protocol between client and server, rather than a more highly structured graphic primitive protocol.
LPC: Life after X Posted Nov 8, 2010 10:42 UTC (Mon) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
> People have been trying to replace X for decades but nothing's taken off yet.
Heard about the newfangled fads "windows" and "Os X" ? X11 market share is truly marginal compared its heyday. Even considering only Linux/Unix, there are probably more android users than X11 users.
As Keith points out, network transparency is done mostly with HTTP these days.
LPC: Life after X Posted Nov 22, 2010 6:31 UTC (Mon) by dododge (subscriber, #2870) [Link] There are just too many impedance mismatches with the native window system, and you need add the huge X11 server software.It's better than it used to be. In my current office the workstations are controlled by corporate IT, and so I'm forced to use a Windows XP desktop to do my Linux development. XMing is a small and free native X server for Windows that is very easy to install and run, and can mix remote X11 clients with native Windows apps on the same desktop. Many current X11 applications use client-side text rendering, which greatly reduces the headaches of getting core fonts working well on the Windows side. Microsoft's own TweakUI will enable X-style pointer focus to work across the entire desktop, which helps to smooth things out. By adjusting a registry setting I even have caps lock mapped to work like a second left-control key across all applications, and since it's part of my profile (rather than a system setting) it doesn't cause trouble for other users of the same machine. It's certainly not perfect, but my desktop is about 3/4 Linux+X11+ssh applications and aside from the native ones not doing middle-mouse pasting it's very easy to forget that there's any Windows stuff on there at all.
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