←back to thread

What to do with an old iPad

(odb.ar)
190 points owenmakes | 1 comments | 05 Sep 25 17:14 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Coming back with my own blog (hosted on iPad 2) after asking here the same question
Show context
somat ◴[06 Sep 25 22:19 UTC] No.45153406[source]▶
Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this"

And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare X server, only the encrusted, encapsulated ones tied down for desktop use. best I can describe it is having a a shared network attached monitor. I was using it sort like you would have a large central status display in an operations center, but small, on a phone.

If curious, I wanted to monitor system temps while playing a full screen game using the excellent but unsearchable "trend" program.

http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/

replies(1): >>45153548 #
imglorp ◴[06 Sep 25 22:36 UTC] No.45153548[source]▶
Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.
replies(6): >>45153619 #>>45154006 #>>45154602 #>>45154790 #>>45156720 #>>45158647 #
1. derriz ◴[07 Sep 25 14:48 UTC] No.45158647[source]▶
It was amazing. Multiple applications running on different servers/machines all working side-by-side on a single desktop workstation. Effectively every GUI application could automatically be run in "client-server mode" (using the terms in the traditional sense not the inverted-X11 sense) without having to write any architecture or OS specific client code.

Although technologically completely unrelated, rich browser applications also fill this niche, and even share warts like the lack of standardized UX behaviors or having issues with dealing with (subtle) difference between "client environment" implementations (different browsers or X11 "servers").

Effectively the web browser became the universal "graphical terminal" in the same way as (in the past) serial TTYs were the universal "textual terminal". Thus X11's "killer app" just slowly became irrelevant.