Remote desktop vs. remote display

Remote desktop vs. remote display

Posted Feb 15, 2013 10:17 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Remote desktop vs. remote display by madscientist
Parent article: LCA: The ways of Wayland

Hmm.

On my Ubuntu system remote desktop is trivial: no need to install anything (it's part of the base system). I select the "Desktop Sharing" applet and enable it, then when I need to connect from a remote system I use the "Remote Desktop Client", enter the server name and my password, and it just works.

and

remote desktop is not what I want and not what a lot of people currently using X want

Can not both be right: if capability is not useful and is not asked-for then why it's there by default?

The only problem: this capability is, again, implemented using a kludge. "Desktop Sharing" using the same trusty VNC with screen scraping, not the much-vaunted "X network transparency".

I can understand why it's done this way but what it boils down to: "X network transparency" is a failure. If we want to propose a replacement then we need to develop something to support the most common usecase first and rare obscure usecase second - even if these are dear to you.

The only meaningful statistic is how many X users who use non-local display operations want remote display, vs. remote desktop.

Wow. Why do you think that it's "the only meaningful statistic"? Why do you think that people who left Linux for MacOS or Windows are not important? I'm seriously tempted to do that myself. I'm still with Linux because I like ThinkPads keyboards enough to cope with all that nonsense, but as time goes on and Lenovo makes them less and less usable in newer models I may decide that "enough is enough" and it's time to switch...

I can assure you that far more than 1% of X users would be very upset to lose remote display and have only remote desktop.

I'm not all that sure. By now a lot of these users are Ubuntu users and they don't know and don't care about all these old crufty stuff. I'm not sure if it's 90% by now or 99% by now, but you can be sure that old-timers who really know how to use all these incantations are in minority: that's why all these incantations are not there in a nice GUI wrappers in default installation, you know. Because few users care.

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