Comment by kjs3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjs3 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not clear on what you're missing. What meme? The protocol is well documented. The basic abstraction is that there is a separation between the 'processing' part of an application and the 'display' part of the application and those two parts communicate using the X11 protocol. That conversation can happen over a local or a remote socket, or shared memory. The practical use cases are that I can have an application running on my local machine, or one on the other side of the world, and the 'display' portion is consistent. Not much different than, say how Citrix uses it's own protocol to draw remote displays.

It allowed a 'mainframe' model where you could have a very fast, expensive application servers that could display to less expensive local resources, and mix the display with local applications. So my heavyweight applications could run on the monster Sun or Cray in the datacenter, but my clock, calc and notepad app ran locally, but all in the same display.

Yes, over the years things like MIT-SHM and NX came along to paper over problematic issues in X11. And yes, there are other, possibly better ways so solve it now. But in the late 80s and through the 90s, it was pretty cool stuff.

It's possible I'm a bit jaded because I spent a long time working on things like Wayland and next-generation graphics technology, where people would suddenly show up and name-drop the terminology "network transparency" as if it meant something, or solved useful problems.

I just find it funny that CORBA-style RPC is now considered a dated, bad approach in the world of distributed systems, but the same thing in the X11 world is considered way ahead of its time and a design ideal.

> I spent a long time working on things like Wayland and next-generation graphics technology

This is really sad. You are insulting and dismissing technology which did something well over 20 years ago that you think is not possible today. And instead of thinking "hmm maybe I should look at the older technology and see how it did it" you just dismiss it as a "meme" and tell people that the actual technology they used is impossible. So much effort is wasted in our industry because of NIH syndrome...

I seriously hope that the Wayland people didn't just completely ignore the positives of Xwindows!

I wrote the linked article explaining X11's internals and design goals in a neutral manner. I've worked on X11 and Xorg ecosystem, worked on the server, I worked on the window managers, the toolkits, applications, compositors, you name it.

I think I'm allowed to have opinions with 40-year hindsight saying that some design decisions have not aged well. I'm not saying X11 is a meme; I'm saying the words "network transparency" ( which never appears once in the documentation; seriously, try to find it https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/xproto/x11protocol.ht... ) are unhelpful, have unclear motivations and goals, and have a massive restraining influence on what a modern protocol can look like and do.

Aaahh! I get it now.

Network transparency: you can run a process remotely and see the same interface that you would have seen if you had (or had been able to) run it locally. Nothing more, nothing less. Mostly marketing.

We're so desperate for network transparency that we're abusing hypertext web browsers as application platforms, because how else can a machine in a datacenter put a GUI on an end user's screen today?

That's not network transparency. A significant part of the application code is running on the local machine and even if the webserver/API server is turned off there are many applications that work offline and only need a remote connection to download the application itself and sync data periodically.

Your definition of network transparency is so weak even an email client would count as a network transparent application even though 100% of the email client is running on the local machine.

A definition of network transparency that is based around the current behavior of X11 would require you to fully own the remote machine. The remote machine is the real computer that is executing application code and all the display server does is output pixels to a screen and send inputs back to the real machine. When you're using a browser or an email client or a smartphone app the real machine is the device you are holding in your hand, not some server sitting in a data center.

Let me rephrase my point. sshing into a remote machine and running vim there would be considered network transparency. Running vim on your own machine on a mounted NFS share would not be an example of network transparency.

Now transfer this to your web browser argument: How many people are actively receiving control over a google server when they log into gmail? Zero.

> how else can a machine in a datacenter put a GUI on an end user's screen today?

A lot of companies are doing it with Citrix. That's a framework which provides Windows users with what 99% of the Unix users asking for X network transparency are really asking for: the ability to run an app or optionally an entire desktop on the server and have it render locally, where it can be used and controlled. There are some optional file sharing things as well, and audio, etc.

I'm sure the network protocols underneath are appalling, but the product does what people want.

> which did something well over 20 years ago

Not sure that was ever true. 20 years ago, MS remote desktop (called "terminal server" at that time) was vastly superior to X11 for remoting.

"RDS was first released as "Terminal Server" in "Windows NT Server 4.0 Terminal Server Edition" a stand-alone operating system including SP3 and fixes built in. Starting with Windows 2000, it was an optional role and became a mainstay of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was improved with each version of Windows. The rename to "Remote Desktop Services" occurred with Windows Server 2008 R2 in 2009."

X predates Windows NT by more than 10 years and is a completely different beast than remote desktop systems. (Disclaimer: I used to log into a local box, run an unpopular window manager on a remote server, and then spread my workload over a number of remote machines. Terminals, email, gui apps, and yes, the cheesy web browser of the time. Seamlessly. (No desktop-in-a-window. Same files everywhere (Thanks, NFS!), same apps (more work to set up than in Plan 9, but didn't have Plan 9's disadvantages, either) everywhere. And that was half a decade before Windows NT.)

> by more than 10 years

Good point. Still, from 2020 both “available for 21 years” and “available for 33 years” more or less equal to “available since forever”.

> is a completely different beast than remote desktop systems

Pretty much the same. I think you’re confusing remote desktop with VNC, TeamViewer and similar. RDP doesn’t just send bitmaps, it sends GDI draw commands, later versions supplemented them with DirectX9 and D3D11 draw calls. The server implements that by replacing GPU driver with a special version which sends draw commands to connected client, as opposed to rendering stuff on the display.

> I spent a long time working on things like Wayland and next-generation graphics technology

I don't know you, so this might come off as overly aggressive. But very little that happens in the FOSS/Linux space and has to do with graphics I would describe with "next gen". Wayland for example is meant as the "ring to rule them all" as a way to drive displays, yet it doesn't even support color management, so it's increasingly useless in a world of non-sRGB displays. X11 does color management (in a cludgy way), for example.

Linux graphics is mostly driven by volunteer work. There is ongoing work to try and get color management done properly (though color management is an extraordinary difficult topic and you could make the argument no display system gets it correct)

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-No...

https://www.omg.org/gettingstarted/history_of_corba.htm

CORBA 1.1 (February 1992) This was the first widely published version of the CORBA specification. It closed many ambiguities in the original specification; added interfaces for the Basic Object Adapter and memory management; clarified the Interface Repository, and clarified ambiguities in the object model.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

X originated at the Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984.[1] The X protocol has been at version 11 (hence "X11") since September 1987.

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