I genuinely wonder if they stopped to think why X11 has sockets or just blindly copied it over. Or are they unaware other forms of IPC exist, that don't require you to go through the kernel 13 times to send a byte to the other process?
UNIX sockets are perfectly fine for IPC with small amounts of data, and is how everything in UNIX has always done it, network transparency or not. They provide a simple, efficient and reliable communication channel between two processes.
There is also wors.
The people who put together TS/RDP are geniuses IMO, it's insane as to how usable it has been for at least 15-ish years...
Security-wise there are concerns but...
Early dial-up Internet days (early for me), 28.8k modem, I was already running Linux, probably on a 486. I also had a very old PC laptop (I think a friend of my parents gifted it to me after he got a new one from work), a 386 I think (with the horrible slow display/refresh rate: a TFT IIRC). I used a parallel cable and PLIP (Parallel Line IP) and X11 networking to send a window manager+browser from the desktop (the 486) to the laptop.
So my brother and I could both go on the Internet at the same time.
It felt like the future and, honestly, we've kinda seriously regressed when it comes to "GUI over the network".
These days it’s unbelievably niche, as opposed to more controlled screen sharing scenarios. I think it’s understandable that it doesn’t get a high priority.
waypipe ssh XXXThe kde one doesn't support remote user login, and while the gnome one does on paper, I never got it to work. The remote connection situation in Wayland is a major regression.
I'm curious why multiple screens is considered legacy baggage and thus out of scope, given how common multiple monitor setups are these days. I also have zero familiarity with X internals, so don't know if multiple monitor support is a horror show that'd be miserable to support.
Traditionally each screen in an X11 setup was it's own separate thing with it's own separate frame buffer. While technically applications could move between screens, this depended on the application caring enough to do so. It had to maintain two(or more) mirrored windows(one per screen) and keep them all aligned. So realistically no application did this.
The modern method of doing multi monitors on X11 involves one large virtual screen with each monitor assigned a section of it. This has downsides, for example; this is where the myth that X11 can't do mixed DPI setups comes from. But it has one huge massive overwhelming upside. The application does not have to be aware that there are multiple screens and multi monitor setups just work.
Old versions of GIMP (back when the toolbars etc. were separate windows) used to let you move any of its windows to a different X screen. And by "move" I don't mean drag - there was a menu where you could select the screen to move to.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinerama [2] https://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xr...
Looked nice, but crossed it off as soon as I saw that, as I'm working on a project currently that uses many screens. Can't just call a thing legacy because you and the people you directly know aren't using it.
Nowadays, multiple monitors present one big virtual framebuffer and only one logical X11 screen.
The normal, usable way to have multiple monitors for your X11 desktop environment is for them to all be combined into one logical screen that you can move windows around in, and that applications aware of the right extensions can discover the actual physical layout of the monitors that comprise the single logical screen. Multiple screens in that X11 sense is a far more obscure feature than simply supporting more than one physical monitor.
What they are talking about is supporting more than one of those, and from app's perspective they are completely separate (can't move windows between them).
While I can see the use cases (say secondary screen only running single app) I never actually used that feature so it's understandable drop.
edit: AND i've been using GNU/Linux and derivatives for the last 20 years.
And for example, it's a weird signal to me when somebody believes the reason X11 has baggage is because it does byte swapping for endianness. This statement alone taints the entire rationale for the project.
by Mark Thomas as an experimental sucessor of the "X Window System" (its development has been cancelled for a long time; the latest release that is available on this website is from 2004).
The German Wikipedia still mentions the "Y Window System":
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=X_Window_System&o...
No one's comparing this to 'y'combinator or 'y'ahoo.
'server' and 'window system' are completely different...
Also this is slop.
Xorg worked under nvidias for years.
There is no need to put this code on GitHub. Everyone with an API key can achieve the same if you hand them the prompt.
This is like committing build artifacts to version control.
On top it's such a lame idea. "What if rewrite in rust applied to X server". Fits on a napkin. Man what a nothingburger :(
Would that change anything about the fundamental cliche-ness here?
Also, no, I'm not clever, but not sure what that has to do with this comment chain.
At least it is worth reading.
- [0] https://wayland.fyi/
Something like XLibre or Phoenix would have been taken very seriously 5 years ago.