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Ancient X11 scaling technology

(flak.tedunangst.com)
283 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 24 Jun 25 18:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.264s | 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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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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1. 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.