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Network TransparencyNetwork TransparencyPosted Nov 8, 2010 21:57 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)Parent article: LPC: Life after X
I really like X's network transparency. In the end, I will be satisfied if network transparency can be reached on a per-application basis no matter how. (If it's just slinging bitmaps around, I can live with that as long as it's per-application and reasonably responsive.) However, there's one big advantage of X's design. Separating out the clients from the servers meant the designers had to really think about the interface. It meant clients couldn't just scribble all over the frame buffer however they liked. And it meant the server could usually prevent disobedient or insane clients from taking the system down. I think this discipline is one of the key factors in the stability, security and reliability of the Linux desktop, and it's something we may lose in a design that lets clients do whatever they want.
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Network Transparency Posted Nov 9, 2010 5:28 UTC (Tue) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
> Separating out the clients from the servers meant the designers had to really think about the interface. It meant clients couldn't just scribble all over the frame buffer however they liked. And it meant the server could usually prevent disobedient or insane clients from taking the system down.
Uh... X does a *really bad* job of this, actually. There are some security extensions these days whose details I'm not familiar with, but at least in classic X, any application can do pretty much anything it wants to -- scribble all over the screen, snoop all input events, lock up the server, change the contents of other app's windows...
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