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Ancient X11 scaling technology

(flak.tedunangst.com)
283 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | 24 Jun 25 18:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.602s | source
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kunzhi ◴[24 Jun 25 20:21 UTC] No.44370610[source]▶
Interesting article, I'll admit when I first saw the title I was thinking of a different kind of "scaling" - namely the client/server decoupling in X11.

I still think X11 forwarding over SSH is a super cool and unsung/undersung feature. I know there are plenty of good reasons we don't really "do it these days" but I have had some good experiences where running the UI of a server app locally was useful. (Okay, it was more fun than useful, but it was useful.)

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xioxox ◴[24 Jun 25 20:46 UTC] No.44370853[source]▶
It's certainly very useful. I do half my work using X11 over ssh and it works reasonably well over a LAN (at least using emacs, plotting, etc).
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1. inetknght ◴[25 Jun 25 00:38 UTC] No.44372584[source]▶
"reasonably well" as in... yeah it works. But it's extremely laggy (for comparison, I know people who forwarded DirectX calls over 10Mbit ethernet and could get ~15 frames/sec playing Unreal Tournament in the early 00's), and any network blip is liable to cause a window that you can neither interact with nor forcefully close.

It felt like a prototype feature that never became production-ready for that reason alone. Then there's all the security concerns that solidify that.

But yes, it does work reasonably well, and it is actually really cool. I just wish it were... better.

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2. uecker ◴[25 Jun 25 04:53 UTC] No.44373725[source]▶
It is laggy but not because of protocol limitations but due to Xlib not being able to hide the latency and we never got the proper support from toolkits to do this via XCB. Xpra or other proxys work around this, but it would be nice if toolkits supported this directly. Also reconnect or moving windows between displays would be no problem if toolkits supported this.
3. welterde ◴[25 Jun 25 12:31 UTC] No.44376543[source]▶
For applications that were written with X11 in mind it works much much better than that. One example was the controlling a telescope. The computers in the control room were thin clients pretty much and displayed various windows from various machines across the mountain - even across multiple different operating systems! Some machines were running Solaris and some linux. The different machines belonged to different aspects of the telescope: some controlled the telescope itself and some machines belonged to the different scientifc instruments on the telescope. And it all worked quite well with no real noticeable lag.