Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode Fairly Quickly”

Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by Spivak on Friday June 28, 2019 @06:13PM (#20309203)

This is true but VNC doesn't exactly win any awards in the performance department in general. Sending bitmap diffs is pretty much the least efficient most naive way to do remote desktop. What VNC has going for it is that it's dead simple to implement because of that fact.

X forwarding goes the complete opposite direction to pipes the whole X protocol over the network. Convenient -- yes, also dead simple to implement -- yes, actually works -- well no. You see the X ecosystem also assumes all rendering is local, that fact is just hidden in edge cases. For example Nvidia graphics work on X with an extension that both has a client and server component -- as soon as you forward X traffic that's looking for the server-side extension... crash.

RDP by contrast does the right thing(tm) but also the hard thing by defining an intermediate object model which is semantic enough to kill the need to send pixels over the wire most of the time but flexible enough to allow for it when necessary.

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Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by Aloha on Friday June 28, 2019 @07:22PM (#20309643)

RDP something like RDP is the correct answer - I thought it worked by effectively streaming GDI calls over the network - well that and whatever they used to replace GDI for 3D enhancements.

I'd agree with you for modern applications that are not well written, I've been running X applications over the network however for 20 years or so, and outside of things like.. well 3D applications, network X works pretty well - my only real complaint was not including sound too.

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Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by DonHopkins on Saturday June 29, 2019 @01:07PM (#20313616)

NCD (Network Computing Devices), who made X Terminals, came up with a sound server called "NetAudio", based on the X11 server, protocol and client library, with the graphics ripped out and sound stuck in.

I used it in the early 90's to support the Unix/X11/TCL/Tk multi player version of SimCity, with a scriptable TCL/Tk audio server that could drive either /dev/audio on Sun/SGI/etc or NetAudio on NCD X Terminals. Other TCL/Tk clients like SimCity (but possibly others) communicated with it via the TCL/Tk "send" command, which bounced messages off the X server.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement...

NetAudio had its problems, but basically worked. Except that it insanely mixed audio by AVERAGING (add waveforms then divide by the number of sounds) instead of adding and clipping, and I couldn't convince the NCD engineer that was the wrong way to mix sound, and to just add and clip instead, like sounds mix in the real world: When you talk over music, the music volume and the volume of your voice doesn't magically lower by half. Hopefully they've fixed that problem by now.

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/sound-mixers.txt

It evolved into the Network Audio System (NAS):

http://www.radscan.com/nas.html

I can't say how popular it is, or if anyone actually uses it, though:

The Release version is now 1.9.4 (10/07/2013).

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Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by Aloha on Saturday June 29, 2019 @05:49PM (#20315005)

I've always wanted one of those NDC boxes to use - they're just kinda hard to get working on a modern network.

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