It had some good ideas, but that was the extent of it. Every iteration of the solution since then has agreed that streaming all application UI is always going to be janky and needless. It's a lot better to host the data on the server and let the client handle visuals.

I used to run Firefox on my Debian server with X tunneling in high school sometimes. It wasn't that bad then and surely it's even better with today's internet.

These days lots of people stream games and CAD sessions over the internet using software like parsec. It works quite well and is often better than the UI running locally on an underpowered GPU.

Sure but most regular consumer or business applications don't really need that level of graphical power. Rendering a menu or button or blurb of text locally from some layout language is always going to be more performant than streaming raw pixels from a server.

It would be, if everyone agreed on a toolkit. As it as, at least X11, AFAIK Wayland, and Windows/RDP ended up just throwing pixels over the wire because every program renders text/menus/whatever differently.

RDP does not mostly do that. It sends higher level commands like text and geometry placement. That’s why it performs 10x better than the competition.

Actually it does do that, since about 2010: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3972/nvidia-gtc-2010-wrapup/3

RDP doesn't perform even 0x better than the competition, like parsec.

I wonder what the world would look like if we decoupled what something is supposed to be and what data it's supposed to have, from how it actually looks and acts. Say, some "lowest common denominator" that works reasonably across all platforms.

For example, I'd say that I need:

  A dropdown for a single option, with options: A, B, C

And let the device itself decide what needs to be displayed in the native GUI toolkit. Then just send that specification over the wire, instead of needlessly wasting the bandwidth on lots of pixels.

Actually, I think I'm just describing an analogue to HTML with the equivalent of CSS provided by the platform, but for native desktop toolkits (hopefully without the complexity of a browser engine).

I heard Stadia was actually pretty good, especially for a game that wasn't super sensitive to fast reactions like RDR2.

Stadia guy here. There were hiccups, but for the price+convenience, it was awesome.

The tech was by most accounts groundbreaking. The problem was with everything else – business model, pricing, games, customer trust.

It wasn't really groundbreaking tech. It's been possible for years, see online. It's just the business model sucks. We did some prototypes in a large company I worked for and it was easy to tell if you could put servers in local data centers with fat pipes it would work. We had demos using ec2 back in 2013. Them we ran the numbers and were like why, esp with free to play becoming more and more of a thing so we canned it.

Nvidia had a successful product as well before stadia. Hell I remember reading a use AWS GPU instances as a gaming machine blog posts before stadia.

I don’t think Stadia itself was groundbreaking. Xbox cloud worked as good as Stadia.

But a few yrs in the big players in the cloud gaming industry figured out some critical latency issues around the controllers and optimizing delivery of the video feed. To the point where lag was almost non-existent on a good fiber connection. The datacenter stuff was obviously the core innovation though.

I still prefer to download my Xbox games to my series s/x but I spent a year playing Xbox cloud games exclusively and I could 100% see that being the default for a big part of the casual audience.

I have streamed my worksession with nomachine and I have used VS code remote. nomachine is really good, but I would still prefer to have a beefy enough machine.

I'm using Steam Remote Play over local LAN for gaming, works pretty well.

X maintainers are promoting a new platform that doesn’t provide for remote hardware rendering. Shipping Javascript to a local web browser seems to be the way ahead for performance.

I bet on LAN X11 forwarding was pretty sweet, but when I tried it over Wi-Fi/tethering is was pretty janky (and before someone suggests xpra, that wasn't buttery smooth either). But I do like the idea of what X11 forwarding is, better than VNC where whole desktop is shared. I read that on Windows RDP can "stream" only the window, whereas on Linux the implementation is full desktop only? (please correct me if I'm wrong cause I would love to tunnel apps from servers).

Honestly, I think xpra is probably the best open solution you will find. It does have (too) many knobs to configure so it takes time to try out different codecs and settings to find a sweet spot using their session info toolset. And the mailing list is very helpful. For example, if bandwidth is plenty, you can use the straight RGB encoding and it performs well. Turning on audio can have effect on your latency as well.

> "stream" only the window

I mean, that is a thing xpra can do. Or, x11vnc can do it with some hoop-jumping.

IIRC, part of the problem is X11 forwarding works best when the software is using raw X primitives (someone can correct my terminology if I'm wrong) because then X11 can just send draw commands. Both GTK and Qt don't use the X11 primitives so instead the server has to send entire pixel buffers, which is naturally a lot slower.

>start running desktop apps on cloud servers for remote work

Hopefully never.