17 Mar
2017
17 Mar
'17
1:13 a.m.
On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 12:04:57AM +0100, Josh Good wrote:
On 2017 Mar 15, 09:40, Kurt H Maier wrote:
I'm a huge X11 fan, use remote display all the time (I'm reading this
mail on slovax.mcvoy.com but I'm on a laptop so when mutt needs to
display a photo or a word doc or whatever, that's all remote X over
wifi, it "works" well enough that I use it a lot).
That said, whatever they did in RDP (which I'm guessing is Microsoft's
remote desktop protocol?) is awesome. Way, way, way better than remote
display. As Josh said, works quite well over a WAN. I've used it to
get desktop access to windows machines in our build cluster and it works
great (I'm in the Santa Cruz mountains and my net connection is point to
point wifi to a tower, not the greatest).
Your usage habits are not natural laws. I'm a systems administrator
too, and I use X11 forwarding every single day, on dozens of different
programs.
It's all very well for X11's networking tools to be useless for you.
That doesn't make them useless in general, and it doesn't mean the
functionality should be deleted.
I don't use X11 forwarding because it works bad/slow over WAN links,
but RDP/ICA works just fine over the same. Also, in X11 forwarding any
network hiccup means the X11 app you are remoting just crashes, that
does not happen in the RDP/ICA world. The real problem is that X11 predates the "GUI
desktop metaphor". In X11
forwarding you remote bitmaps (or vectors or primitives or whatever)
which belong to an app, whereas in RDP you remote bitmaps (and only
bitmaps, and never anything more than bitmaps) which belong to a "full,
self-contained, GUI desktop".
Huh. So is RDP better because it does bitmap to bitmap compression?
In my opinion, X11 is not appropriate for desktops
--it is designed more
for a scientific workstation kind of thing--, but currently there is
just no mature alternative in the Unix/Linux world (except for Mac OS X,
of course).
I'd be stoked if X11 had an RDP extension or something. I have no idea if
that makes sense but RDP is the shit.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm