Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 4, 2018 18:31 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: Microsoft acquires GitHub by excors
Parent article: Microsoft acquires GitHub

I disagree. Linux applications run on Windows with WSL, but they don't run natively and don't integrate properly, e. g. GUIs won't work at all and everything that requires any sort of interaction with Windows' APIs will also require a real port to the Windows platform.

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 5, 2018 3:21 UTC (Tue) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link] (9 responses)

> GUIs won't work at all

That's not 100% true. There have always been X11 servers on Windows..

A not so tech-savy (or should I say ideologically unstable...) acquaintance of mine had installed some free (as in free beer at least) Xserver in Windows and asked me how to start a GUI application from WSL. To my surprise it was only a 150 MB apt-get and an export DISPLAY=... statement away.

No, I have no idea how feasible that is for real work or whether one would end up in eternal incompatibilities and crashes. But at least 20+ years ago I did all my Unix work from Windows 3.11 running Exceed, a commercial X11 server implementation. Of course 3.11 was as unstable as it was, but Exceed was a pretty good product, probably quite expensive.

(I did not memorize what Xserver my acquaintance had installed, because I don't intend to use Windows any time soon. I guess it must have been Xming.)

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 5, 2018 3:59 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

I've been using cygwin/X for years and it just worked.

After a lapse I had to do something like this again. Out of curiosity and for a change I started using WSL + Xming + ssh forwarding and while not super responsive it's perfectly usable.

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 6, 2018 0:15 UTC (Wed) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link] (5 responses)

It'll be a sad day if and when Wayland supplants X11. I can install XQuartz on macOS, ssh -X into server, and run, e.g., virt-manager without so much as *thinking* about a configuration file or GUI. While it doesn't look native it feels local because of the low latency on the LAN, something I can't say for VNC-like protocols that just send buffers and buffer updates. And all the years spent making it work transparently will take awhile to replicate with the alternatives, assuming that ever even happens.

It's been many years since I've used Windows, but I remember it being similarly simple, at least compared to the VNC and RDP alternatives. IIRC I variously used both a [trial] commercial server as well as Cygwin's XFree86 port.

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 6, 2018 18:57 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

> It'll be a sad day if and when Wayland supplants X11.

Which is probably inevitable, seeing as Wayland is X13 in all but name ...

But seeing as one of the driving forces behind Wayland seems to be to fix X11's design faults, I'm guessing your problems may just disappear in the transition.

Cheers,
Wol

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 7, 2018 2:39 UTC (Thu) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link] (3 responses)

Wayland doesn't even try to handle remote rendering. The recommended solution today is to simply use X11 with your local X11 server as a Wayland client. Wayland was literally built around shared memory as the major design choice, and there's no way to change that even if you wanted. You can of course send entire pixmaps over the network (without the optimization of shared memory) but it's no better than VNC, tantamount to ditching remote terminals over SSH by running the Unix terminal client (e.g. gnome-terminal, Terminal.app, xterm) on the server and just sending the composited window over the network. You can get fancy with compression and region updates, but that's no different than simply using a modern video compression standard; it'll never be as responsive as what we have now. Moreover, the way Wayland handles Window management and input events makes Wayland even more hostile to remote rendering.

If and when Wayland manages to supplant X11 such that X11 drawing support disappears from GUI toolkits, network transparent GUI applications will simply die. That will be because any mechanism to make Wayland as seamlessly network transparent as X11 would involve bolting on an entirely duplicative protocol which would look no different than the Wayland+X11 solution. The chances of GUI toolkits actually integrating such a beast, were it ever to come to fruition, after having ditched X11 client support would be nil. Basically, network transparent GUIs will live and die with X11.

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 7, 2018 6:49 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

aiui (from listening to the Wayland devs), Wayland is network-neutral. If someone wants to make it work over the network - so far no-one has - then it's not going to be a problem.

I suspect you're confusing Wayland the protocol with Wayland the sample implementation - as I understand it there is absolutely nothing standing in the way of the app running on one computer sending drawing requests down the wire to a renderer on another computer.

I don't know how it works, but aiui there is absolutely nothing in the wire protocol that expects client and server to be on the same computer. So replacing X completely (and being "a better X than X") is definitely on the agenda. It just requires somebody to do the work.

Cheers,
Wol

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 7, 2018 15:01 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

There are no "drawing requests" in Wayland. It's all surfaces and bitmaps.

But this isn't a problem. In practice X is no better. Toolkits these days don't use X11 draw functions. It's just bitmaps.

So network display of Wayland works the same as any other remote display system: encode it as a video stream.

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 7, 2018 9:23 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

My experience (which is not that fresh) was that e.g. NX over SSH over WAN connection didn't feel any slower or more jerky than X11 over SSH over LAN. Also it was really nice that I could leave the full session running on the server and when connecting from a different client, I could continue with the exact same session.

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 7, 2018 21:40 UTC (Thu) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (1 responses)

> had installed some free (as in free beer at least) Xserver in Windows and asked me how to start a GUI application from WSL

The sad truth is that it's probably easier now to run X11/Unixy GUI applications on Windows than macOS, despite its "true" Unix heritage. XQuartz has annoying bugs and is entirely unusable on multi-monitor setups.

Microsoft acquires GitHub

Posted Jun 8, 2018 5:41 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

I use XQuartz on multiple monitors every day. It's certainly not great but it is usable (cause I use it).