51–60 of 259 posts
>X is the graphical interface for essentially all Unix derived desktops (all other competitors [link to Display PostScript wikipedia page] died decades ago). Since when was an X-Windows extension a "competitor" to X? Display PostScript was simply a proprietary X-Windows extension that fell out of fashion, not a competitor to X-Windows. NeWS was a competitor to X-Windows that died decades ago, but Display PostScript w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bar for being important enough to not discard when it works and is the only solution to particular problems is not very high. I know of no other method to forward individual programs GUIs to other machines. Abandoning X is abandoning a power we have. You're right that it may not be used as much. Last time I used it was to debug why selenium tests running in chrome were failing in a server with a virtual display (…
> Abandoning X is abandoning a power we have. A power that literally no one uses. Well, no one that matters anyway. For values of "matter" equivalent to "uses a modern desktop". Whatever the case, modern development heavily favors coding for the common case, not supporting a flexible framework that can accommodate fringe cases. And in 2019, your use case is fringe.
People with opinions like yourself are why gnome software developers removed gui functionality for managing raid arrays from gnome disks with the explanation that people should just use btrfs or zfs. This left you with an easy gui to create a raid array that you wont be able to fix without learning cli tools.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140327002450/http://worldofgno...
At the time you couldn't insofar as I'm aware in the installer create a zfs or btrfs raid in 2014. Further reports of btrfs eating data were still disturbingly common and zfs wasn't in anyones official repos.
Regarding the "modern" desktop
"That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" of "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary", "conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous--that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about."
C.S. Lewis The screwtape letters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you got it kinda backwards, but due to confusing naming you wouldn’t be the first. It’s more like I’m logging into a remote server (using stuff like SSH), starting applications there and getting the GUI up on my local desktop, like any other local window/app, due to X-forwarding (back to my Xorg server). It’s not perfect, but it sure is a lot more “natural” and integrated into your desktop than VNC or RDP. I…
RDP has had remote app for a long time now, which is essentially the same thing: run program on remote machine, forward its window to local.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Project
>Initially the system was prototyped on Sun Microsystems machines, and then to IBM RT PC series computers running a special IBM Academic Operating System. People involved in the project included James H. Morris, Nathaniel Borenstein, James Gosling, and David S. H. Rosenthal.
>The Andrew Window Manager (WM), a tiled (non-overlapping windows) window system which allowed remote display of windows on a workstation display. It was one of the first network-oriented window managers to run on Unix as a graphical display. As part of the CMU's partnership with IBM, IBM retained the licensing rights to WM. WM was meant to be licensed under reasonable terms, which CMU thought would resemble a relatively cheap UNIX license, while IBM sought a more lucrative licensing scheme. WM was later replaced by X11 from MIT. Its developers, Gosling and Rosenthal, would next develop the NeWS (Network extensible Window System).
Andrew died! Andrew is dead!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZMuBIJxmnA&feature=youtu.be...
How often mankind has wished for a world as peaceful and secure as the one Andrew provided.
>X is the graphical interface for essentially all Unix derived desktops (all other competitors [link to Display PostScript wikipedia page] died decades ago). Since when was an X-Windows extension a "competitor" to X? Display PostScript was simply a proprietary X-Windows extension that fell out of fashion, not a competitor to X-Windows. NeWS was a competitor to X-Windows that died decades ago, but Display PostScript w…
>X is the graphical interface for essentially all Unix derived desktops (all other competitors [link to Display PostScript wikipedia page] died decades ago). Since when was an X-Windows extension a "competitor" to X? Display PostScript was simply a proprietary X-Windows extension that fell out of fashion, not a competitor to X-Windows. NeWS was a competitor to X-Windows that died decades ago, but Display PostScript w…
I love how easy it is to configure via config files, external monitors work great, scaling on HiDPI displays has been totally painless. My days off fiddling with xorg config and xrandr are behind me.
I know the creator of sway hangs out here, so if you're reading this, thank you!
>X is the graphical interface for essentially all Unix derived desktops (all other competitors [link to Display PostScript wikipedia page] died decades ago). Since when was an X-Windows extension a "competitor" to X? Display PostScript was simply a proprietary X-Windows extension that fell out of fashion, not a competitor to X-Windows. NeWS was a competitor to X-Windows that died decades ago, but Display PostScript w…
I guess the author is referring to NeXTSTEP and NeWS, which both used DPS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both RDP and Citrix do support publishing just the application, without desktop. It is actually pretty neat to have application, running somewhere in the server room, to be mixed with my local applications. Going even further, the remote applications can run each on different machine in the Citrix cluster, so it is possible to load balance on per-app basis.
Don't these solutions simply crop the desktop out? You used to be able to see the desktop behind the app if you resized the window rapidly.
>X is the graphical interface for essentially all Unix derived desktops (all other competitors [link to Display PostScript wikipedia page] died decades ago). Since when was an X-Windows extension a "competitor" to X? Display PostScript was simply a proprietary X-Windows extension that fell out of fashion, not a competitor to X-Windows. NeWS was a competitor to X-Windows that died decades ago, but Display PostScript w…
Didn't NeXTSTEP use DPS without X?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript
In 1985, two years before DPS was started and four years before NeXTSTEP was released, James Gosling and David Rosenthal at Sun developed their own PostScript interpreter for NeWS, originally called SunDew, which was distinct from and quite different than DPS, and wasn't licensed from Adobe.
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
Then in 1993, NeXT and Sun developed OpenStep for X-Windows/DPS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
One of the biggest architectural difference between NeXTSTEP/DPS and NeWS is that NeXTSTEP didn't take advantage of the technique we now call "AJAX," by implementing the user interface toolkit itself in PostScript running in the window server, to increase interactive response and reduce network messages and round trips.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13783967
NeXTSTEP wasn't trying to solve the remote desktop problem: the toolkit implemented in Objective C code just happened to be using local networking to talk to the DPS server, but in no way was optimized for slow network connections like NeWS was (and AJAX is).
You couldn't run NeXTSTEP applications over a 9600 baud Telebit TrailBlazer modem, but NeWS was great for that. I worked on the UniPress Emacs display driver for NeWS, which was quite usable over a modem, because you do stuff like text selection feedback, switching and dragging multiple tabbed windows around, and popping up and navigating pie menus, all implemented in PostScript running locally in the window server, without any network traffic!
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs.ps.txt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:
used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.
used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.
used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.