Re:On Abandoning the X Server
by GekkePrutser on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @06:37PM
(#24924965)
That's not a great trend though. Having actual programs rather than entire desktops run remotely is amazingly handy. A desktop inside a window has never been a great experience.
Indeed it's not great at high-latency, it was invented for rooms full of local X-terminals (that were on constantly so connection loss wasn't an issue either, unless someone messed with the cable terminators :P )
I would love for this to continue being developed though, as there is still a great usecase for it IMO. But the protocol could really be cleaned up removing a lot of round-trips with locally cached variants (basically what NoMachine NX and X2GO are doing).
I do agree it makes sense in this increasingly cloud-centric world.. I hope it will eventually come too!
Although X was remote-capable from early on, it was never especially well designed for remote uses. For example you can't easily detach from a display and move an app to a different display. And it's not very good at latency on a high-latency network. Partly that's because of how it assigned XIDs in the protocol; they should have been client-assigned. It would still be possible to make that change (as an extension) but it hasn't been done.
It would be great if there was a modern remote desktop application protocol, that works well over all kinds of networks and allows application windows be moved between different display clients easily (e.g. from your laptop to your desktop at work). Or even better, let the application move as well, for ideal responsiveness everywhere.
I think we will get that eventually, because it's such a natural evolution of all the distributed things we're building. But I think it will be a long time coming.