How Important Is The Wayland Display Server?

[drag]

How horrible latency you have? My 1M connection can even run basic remote applications because my ping inside country is worst case 15ms in evening time. Best case latencies are about 8ms when traffic is not maxed in my ISP network.

And my WIFI card in laptop is only 802.11b with 2ms ping to router. Only thing that has problems is large animations and video in web. (Flash is probably the worst example) Of course problem is more in how firefox does rendering than in X.

I agree that NX is better implementation of X protocol handling over Internet but I don't see X as horrible solution that requires huge net connections.

He has to be blowing smoke out of his ass.

Using Remote Desktop on a local machine from a VM side by side with a full screen Gnome session running over SSH encryption over a corporate network to a machine in a different building... The Gnome desktop not only had much better performance and response, but looked a hell of a lot better.

And when it comes to running desktops over high-latency, low-bandwidth internet links nothing holds a candle to NX, which is just X Windows with extra techniques to reduce round trips and can use high compression for bitmaps.

So... whatever.

I'll take X terminals over Rdesktop or Cytrix any day of the week.

The trick for dealing with Firefox/Flash and other large animations is to run that crap on your local machine, which is easy to do with some ssh/scripting trickery. This is how you can run graphics intensive programs on a X Terminal. And due to the nature of X you can just do one application remotely/locally without having to dedicate a entire desktop to it.

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Also if you want to improve performance over SSH go and create a ~/.ssh/config and disable compression. If you want then also change the encryption method to something less heavy then the defaults.. like arcfour or blowfish. By default X uses AES-128, with the fallback to TripleDES.

See 'man ssh_config' for details. It's easy to set per-host settings and set up aliases for specific purposes.

Of course for best performance you don't use SSH encryption at all, but it's a nice thing to have.

[nhaehnle]

Wow. It's amazing that these things keep coming up. Pretty much all the objections people have with X are either

1. not really part of X, or
2. part of X but have already been addressed, or
3. part of X and are being addressed, or
4. will plague any reimplementation of X anyway.

Also, all the complainers about X seem to be pretty uninformed. You haven't even mentioned the ICCCM! (Maybe because that's something that's going to bother any multi-process desktop environment, independently of whether it's X or some magic replacement).

Oh, and finally: X is improving. Seriously. And what makes you think that any replacement of X would improve faster? That's pretty wishful thinking, but on the other hand, hey: All those improvements that have moved into the X ecosystem lately actually make it /easier/ to write a replacement of X, and yet nobody has come forward with serious plans to do so. I smell a lot of bullshit complaints from the idle commentators.

Edit: By the way, I obviously do not think the whole X ecosystem is perfect. That's one of the reasons why I'm doing my part to contribute. It's just annoying to see so many misleading complaints again and again.

[suokko]

Even with my 24mbit connection here it's still quite useless. 5 seconds to open a menu? That is not good. TightVNC is much, much faster. Also, NX is speedy too and I wonder why X doesn't do by itself what NX does.



No, Windows is not expecting you to do any such thing. There's remote desktop (*much* faster than remote X), and there's again VNC. This is not something exclusive to X. Also, it's pretty well-known that Windows can do this and I wonder how it can be you've never heard of it.






Er, great. I'm gonna buy a 10gbit pipe now at home. Every "desktop" user seems to have one. Costs a few thousand dollars, but hey, if it's for X, I can spare that.

/sarcasm off

How horrible latency you have? My 1M connection can even run basic remote applications because my ping inside country is worst case 15ms in evening time. Best case latencies are about 8ms when traffic is not maxed in my ISP network.

And my WIFI card in laptop is only 802.11b with 2ms ping to router. Only thing that has problems is large animations and video in web. (Flash is probably the worst example) Of course problem is more in how firefox does rendering than in X.

I agree that NX is better implementation of X protocol handling over Internet but I don't see X as horrible solution that requires huge net connections.

[tball]

At home? I mean to the Internet. 10gbit to the Internet. 10gbit at home I have already. No one I know uses remote X to connect to the machines at work from home. NX by far faster and provides a complete desktop. Plain X just doesn't cut it. I don't want a single app; I want a whole desktop.

Anyway, the thread is derailed. Remote X is not a real problem since NX and VNC exist.

You are really missing each others points.

RealNC, you are talking about a remote screenshots downloads over the internet via VNC ;-).
VNC is nothing but som koordinated screenshots, where you can click at a koordinate, and the remote pc would respond the click at that specific koordinate (Correct me if I'm wrong). Thats like streaming screenshots from the remote pc to the local, which works quite good over the internet.

Thats not quite what X is doing, if I understanded it correctly. You can't even compare the two. X has the ability to open up the remote app on the local computer, like if it was a app actually running on the local computer. I.E. not a screenshot. The disadvantages with that over the vnc, is that you need very good ping times, which you don't always got over the internet. The advantage is that you don't use that much bandwidth, because you don't download screenshots but X-functions, and has the ability to open single applications and not the whole desktop (screendump if you like)

[RealNC]

Remote X was designed for running applications over a LAN with minimal network bandwidth usage, and it does that well. Complaining that it doesn't do something that it wasn't designed for when you have other alternatives which do just seems silly.

No, silly is saying the same thing I arrived at the end of my post and therefore proving that you don't read the whole post.

[movieman]

At home? I mean to the Internet. 10gbit to the Internet. 10gbit at home I have already.

10 gigabit home network? You must be rich.

I honestly don't understand your problem: there are well-known issues with latency in the X protocol over WANs, which is why you have to resort to using a kludge like VNC instead. Any other protocol which requires round trip messaging will suffer from the same kind of problems.

I don't want a single app; I want a whole desktop.

Then VNC is perfect for you. What's the problem?

Remote X was designed for running applications over a LAN with minimal network bandwidth usage, and it does that well. Complaining that it doesn't do something that it wasn't designed for when you have other alternatives which do just seems silly.

[RealNC]

At home? I mean to the Internet. 10gbit to the Internet. 10gbit at home I have already. No one I know uses remote X to connect to the machines at work from home. NX by far faster and provides a complete desktop. Plain X just doesn't cut it. I don't want a single app; I want a whole desktop.

Anyway, the thread is derailed. Remote X is not a real problem since NX and VNC exist.

[movieman]

Even with my 24mbit connection here it's still quite useless. 5 seconds to open a menu? That is not good.

The Windows apps I run from the server to the laptop over the LAN work about as well as Windows apps running natively on the laptop (other than Wine bugs).

The one thing that kills X performance is round-trip latency, which VNC and similar protocols don't need to worry about because they're 'fire and forget' and don't do round trips.

There's remote desktop (*much* faster than remote X), and there's again VNC.

I've never, ever seen anyone use Windows remote desktop; it's only available in server versions, isn't it?

And VNC is an even more horrible kludge on Windows than it is on Linux; forcing people to display a complete desktop in order to run one application is bad enough, without forcing them to use the same desktop as the logged-in user.

Er, great. I'm gonna buy a 10gbit pipe now at home. Every "desktop" user seems to have one. Costs a few thousand dollars, but hey, if it's for X, I can spare that.

Setting up a gigabit network at home for a dozen machines cost me about $100. Even the 100Mbps switch for $20 at your local computer store is much more powerful than the networks I was running X11 over fifteen years ago, yet somehow the performance is supposed to have gone from OK to 'pure suckage'.

[energyman]

hm, I used remote X in my university over a shared 2mbit connection. And speed was ok. Well enough to do basic stuff like - surfing, using some central encyclopedia like app some others.

[RealNC]

Remote X is one of the best things about Linux; being able to run any program anywhere from anywhere

Even with my 24mbit connection here it's still quite useless. 5 seconds to open a menu? That is not good. TightVNC is much, much faster. Also, NX is speedy too and I wonder why X doesn't do by itself what NX does.

is a huge benefit compared to Windows expecting you to sit at the console all the time.

No, Windows is not expecting you to do any such thing. There's remote desktop (*much* faster than remote X), and there's again VNC. This is not something exclusive to X. Also, it's pretty well-known that Windows can do this and I wonder how it can be you've never heard of it.

I routinely run X programs from my Linux servers with the display on my Windows laptop; heck, I even run Windows programs on my Linux servers displaying to my Windows laptop when the software needs access to the server hardware rather than the laptop hardware.

I used to run Windows in a PC-emulator from HP or Alpha unix systems using X11 over a shared 10Mbps Ethernet; if running X applications over switched Gigabit ethernet is 'pure suckage', that must have been horrible.

Er, great. I'm gonna buy a 10gbit pipe now at home. Every "desktop" user seems to have one. Costs a few thousand dollars, but hey, if it's for X, I can spare that.

/sarcasm off