NX dead end? [LWN.net]

How old is this project? Why doesn't it get more attention? etc

Posted Feb 14, 2012 10:09 UTC (Tue) by amtota (guest, #4012) [Link]

> How old is this project?
The original version (this is a fork) was started sometime in 2008 by Nathaniel Smith, the earliest reference I can find on LWN is http://lwn.net/Articles/276855/ - "Announcing xpra v0.0.4" - April 2008. I've spent the last 3 years actively improving/packaging/supporting it.

> Why doesn't it get more attention? Why haven't I heard about it till now? Why Why Why???
Because I spend my time trying to make it work better (coding mostly), not writing press releases? Although I should probably do a bit more of the latter..

> In one shot you solve one of my biggest problems (long story...) and I only find out because I happened to read all the *comments* on a story?
Glad it helped.

How old is this project? Why doesn't it get more attention? etc

Posted Feb 14, 2012 11:34 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Sounds really useful, particularly since you have a Windows port and I often need Windows to Linux interoperability.

Please send announcements of new releases to LWN and Freshmeat (now Freecode) at least - that would get you a lot more visibility and not take much time.

It would also help if you mentioned on the site the key words 'remote access' and that you cover a similar problem space to NX (and to some extent VNC) - it's not clear from the xpra site that it works well over low bandwidth connections. Also useful if you mention that xpra over SSH is supported - it's given as an example but mentioning it as a feature would be good.

How old is this project? Why doesn't it get more attention? etc

Posted Feb 14, 2012 14:02 UTC (Tue) by amtota (guest, #4012) [Link]

> Please send announcements of new releases to LWN and Freshmeat (...)
Will do for LWN, problem is that I tend to do one or two releases a month and don't really want to spam LWN.. The original (unmaintained) version is on freshmeat so unless I rename this fork, I can't update that.

> (..) mentioned on the site the key words 'remote access'
> Also useful if you mention that xpra over SSH is supported
Both done, also added more info to the home page. Thanks!

> it's not clear from the xpra site that it works well over low bandwidth connections
It's OK, I've added some info to the site. FYI: on localhost and using mmap, it's seriously fast.
By design NX will remain king for certain applications in this department, but this advantage is quickly disappearing for the exact same reasons that work in favour of Wayland (newer apps rely on toolkits rather than the old and crufty X11 APIs)

(sorry for hijacking the thread)

How old is this project? Why doesn't it get more attention? etc

Posted Feb 14, 2012 19:23 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

I don't see an update or two a month as being a big problem for blurbs to LWN

and it sure would help visibility of the project.

How old is this project? Why doesn't it get more attention? etc

Posted Feb 17, 2012 21:32 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

wow, screen for X, and I knew nothing about it. Absolutely no need to apologise for 'thread hijacking'. This is a very useful thing indeed, which apprently not enough people know about. I've waited for NX for many years but it's always been a big pain in practice (forks, licencing, server not in Debian). Anything that gives me reconnectable-at-home/work X apps is _extremely_ useful. X over ssh is OK, but it doesn't give you the 'reconnect' feature.

If it's good it might even get me out of a range of terminal-based core practices which are text-based because the 'reconnectable single instance' aspect is the most important thing (irc, email).

How old is this project? Why doesn't it get more attention? etc

Posted Feb 17, 2012 23:38 UTC (Fri) by khc (subscriber, #45209) [Link]

I've been using winswitch (http://winswitch.org/) which wraps around Xpra and gives you a pretty GUI to work with.