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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

At work, we do X11 forwarding all the times. We have a wide variety of UNIX machines and we often need to run several graphical applications from different machines (not a remote desktop).

X11 forwarding works with the latest Linux distros as well a 20+ year old systems running motif apps. Note: the old systems are now virtualized but we still need them, I work in the aeronautic industry and these are the time scales we are working with.

I don't know of any replacement, at least not one with that level of adoption. Again, we really want to run graphical applications on a server, not a remote desktop.

And BTW, things are getting troublesome. More and more Linux apps integrate accelerated web browser components and these tend not to play well with X11 forwarding.

Love the irony of using a remote display to show an Electron app BTW.

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Not just Electron, even QT as well performs horrible over X11 forwarding in recent versions...

Things seems to be going backwards in this area..

When I was at Qt I spent a decent amount of time porting the native rendering engine from Qt4 to Qt5. It should be available and work relatively well. I have retired from the Qt project, but it looks like the code is still there in the repo. [1] You might need to tell the configure script to build it. To use it, set the QT_XCB_NATIVE_PAINTING environment variable.

[1] https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtbase.git/tree/src/plugins/platf...

Idle curiosity: what kind of applications are these remote systems running? You mentioned the aeronautic industry but I'm not familiar enough with it to imagine the kinds of things you would need to run remotely.

A big one is a test tool for avionics running on Solaris. We are retiring it but some test procedures still require a specific version of it. And we don't want to update (and recertify) these procedures.

We also have a homemade documentation system, again outdated but certified. I don't remember the system but it is definitely not a modern Linux. I think there is also a Fortran tool used to compute the lifespan of parts on the same system.

A bit more recent, we have test benches made of several computers, mostly Linux desktops, each one deal with different things like real or simulated avionic hardware, they can be remote controlled but some apps run locally and have their own displays.

We also have certified build chains running on specific systems, and while a GUI is typically not needed. It may be useful from time to time, mostly for debugging.

We are in a process of modernizing all that stuff, but because of certification and the average lifespan of a program, it is a very slow process...

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