Ancient X11 scaling technology

Brilliant. This is another piece of evidence on the pile of why we got Wayland: it's because people who understood X11 mostly retired and everyone else couldn't be bothered to learn X11 because it's "yucky C code" or something. And it bothers me that we lose remote rendering with Wayland (unless one fights with waypipe) that was just built-in to X11. Yes, it was slow, but actually if you're running a VM on your local system and using SSH to connect to it, then it works great. Sigh. I'm an old person yelling at clouds.

This is nonsensical myth-making. Despite the clickbait title, the APIs called in those code samples are very basic and not some forgotten wizardry.

What part is nonsensical? Because Wayland is basically a fulfillment of jwz's CADT.

The part where we got Wayland because we lost a magic caste of rockstar engineers who could call XRRGetOutputInfo/XRRGetCrtcInfo.

> Yes, it was slow,

Not particularly if you are on a low latency network. Modern UI toolkits make applications way less responsive that classical X11 applications running across gigabit ethernet.

And even on a fast network the wayland alternative of 'use RDP' is almost unusable.

the approach used in this blog post requires rdp. It's not drawing using X, so there's no vector network transparency.

Nope, this post is using GLX over the network.

Clients can draw locally and composite remotely. I do not see the issue.

Nope, that's indirect rendering and is limited to OpenGL 1.4 more or less. This is using a much newer OpenGL than that.

Also if you look at the source it's specifying direct rendering in glxCreateContext: https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/xtoys/v/tip/f/circle.c & https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL-Refpages/gl2.1/xhtml/glX...

The only thing leaving that process is a pixbuf, zero X11, identical to Wayland.

draw locally composite remotely is literally Wayland's philosophy and is one of the biggest contentious issues for the pro-X11 crowd.

For whatever reason X11 shoving pixbufs over the network seems to have orders of magnitude better performance than actual RDP over a high speed network.

This what Wayland copied from modern X clients.