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X410 – X Server for Windows 10

x410.dev

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Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#101
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the support contract details from RedHat, but they are one very large contributor to the kernel and other parts of the eco system as they employ lots of the contributors. Also, their source is freely available, they call it CentOS.

RHEL and CentOS are different things. RHEL source is available on its own, independent of CentOS. e.g. http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/7Server/en/os/...

I don't think that all sources are available. For example they have extended support and I don't think that they publish those sources.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#102
post #93

Does anyone want to share how they use the WSL2 & X-Server combination? In my case, I'm mostly happy with the VSCode WSL2 integration. I keep all my projects on the linux fs and it is fast to work with. The only thing which annoys me is the window management in Windows. Too much Mouse movement and random ALT-TAB-ing. I've never got i3 to work with a Windows x server on multiple displays with high dpi. X401 also only…

As for Windows native window management, FancyZones is better than nothing. You can overlay zones, I have split each monitor in half with two zones each, then overlayed a bunch of smaller zones for stuff like terminal windows, etc. https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/tree/master/src/modul...

Looks like the windows equivalent of the Gnome GTile window manager extension: https://github.com/gTile/gTile

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#103

They are asking $50 for something that there are other open source solutions for. It would be interesting to find out how much of the original source code is the developers and how much is just repackaging of one of the multitude of open source X servers for Windows that are currently available. Originally thinking it was another open source project, I looked at the website to see if there were some features that wou…

I don’t mind the price. They need to fund development. More open source projects should do the same. And being rather niche on the Microsoft store means they’re already catering to a consumer that is under the impression to buy something whereas if this were a normal Ubuntu desktop it’s free.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#105

If someone could make Windows applications render on an X Server I'd be so happy.

On some Windows versions (Enterprise and Server) you can do that with RemoteApp, a Terminal Services RDP extension, easily managed with this tool: https://github.com/kimmknight/remoteapptool (or through registry)

I understand your request to be: Run Applications on Windows, and get the output over network to a Linux machine running a graphical window manager, without having to "transport" a desktop surrounding your program.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most successful open source company ever (RedHat) made their whole business packaging up open source in a nice manner. People will pay for convenience and polish. Also, i would guess that Windows users are not likely to be free software purists and just wants something that works with a minimum of fuss. The price of software should be based on the value it provides to the user, not on what it cost to make it.

That glosses over RedHat's strong arm sales tactics of the community, and rules-lawyering the GPL. Redistributing "their" source, as allowed by the GPL, is liable for your support license to not get renewed. And where's the Red Hat kernel source in a digestible format? I haven't followed recently, but they were at one point distributing their diffs to the mainline kernel as a single giant patch file and arguing that…

I've given money to Canoncial for Ubuntu.

Also, RedHat stopped providing detail changelogs and started doing just one bug diff dump after Oracle started hurting their business -- where Oracle's work at the time was basically repackaging RedHat's work and doing "sed s/RedHat Enterprise Linux/Oracle Unbreakable Linux". RedHat did what it felt needed to fend that off.

Up until that time, they were publishing their internal repositories.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#107

They are asking $50 for something that there are other open source solutions for. It would be interesting to find out how much of the original source code is the developers and how much is just repackaging of one of the multitude of open source X servers for Windows that are currently available. Originally thinking it was another open source project, I looked at the website to see if there were some features that wou…

Is there one I have tried in the past and not had any sucsess

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#108

Does anyone want to share how they use the WSL2 & X-Server combination? In my case, I'm mostly happy with the VSCode WSL2 integration. I keep all my projects on the linux fs and it is fast to work with. The only thing which annoys me is the window management in Windows. Too much Mouse movement and random ALT-TAB-ing. I've never got i3 to work with a Windows x server on multiple displays with high dpi. X401 also only…

I'm curious, I always thought that devs who choose Windows do so because they like the window management and the UI tools etc. That's my reason for sure. What's stopping you from just running proper Linux with VS Code, if you don't like the way the Windows shell works?

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#109
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always bemuses me to see some Linux developers talk like there is literally no other option, and that all 'real' development is done on Linux. Meanwhile, in the Real World(tm), something like 80% of all software is developed for Windows or other non-Linux operating systems. Linux is just the most popular, at the moment, with a small subset of developers in a certain age-range. Mostly web-developers working outsi…

> Linux is just the most popular, at the moment, with a small subset of developers in a certain age-range. Mostly web-developers working outside of the enterprise environments, such as startups. These are people that think MySQL is a real database, PHP is a proper programming language, and Bash is the only shell. And MSSQL has great features, like lack of pagination, VBA is a proper language, ASP.NET was a proper fra…

These are straw man arguments, and you know it.

1) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/select-or...

2) VBA is 1990s legacy, nobody in their right mind has used it for new software development in at least the last decade. VB.NET (which is semantically nearly the same as C#) has been around since 2005. I mean, that would be crazy! That would be like using a unsafe language from the 1970s like C for new software development in 2020. Nuts. Just nuts. Nobody in their...oh. Never mind.

3) ASP.NET Core MVC is very popular and very good. It's fast out-of-the-box, has native multithreading, native async without callback hell, has proper i18n support, etc, etc...

By the way, Blazor is absolutely amazing technology unique to ASP.NET, and at the moment only Rust has anything even vaguely comparable. But Rust has none of the back-end support.

ASP.NET also has impressive integration of technologies like reactive extensions and SignalR. I doubt there's a more elegant or easier-to-use API for WebSockets out there.

4) IIS works fine for www.microsoft.com, www.live.com, etc... Works fine for our customers. For an idea of how much more advanced IIS is than some other platforms, it is not only multi-threaded out of the box, it's NUMA aware too: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/get-started/planning-yo...

Speaking of "shit shows", IIS, like most Windows server software, doesn't have to be restarted for a minor config change.

5) Enterprise-grade is software that is priced for a market that has requirements many developers haven't even considered.

Things like live backups that don't interrupt users. Error messages in French. Correct formatting of numbers and dates, because not everybody thinks that "month-day-year" makes sense. It means support for access control lists, not just "owner-group-other". It means centralised authentication support that works. It means auditing, not just "syslog". It means documentation written by technical writers, not a comment to "read the source".

PS: The first point is particularly bothersome, because database-side paging support actually makes very little sense from a relational theory point of view, which is why many engines never had support, or pay only lip service to it.

Let me explain: Sit down an think about what paging means in the context of a database with, say, 5000 concurrent user sessions. You either, A) allow users to hold on to transactions for nearly forever to ensure that your server is overloaded, or B) page through your data without long snapshots or transactions, in which case each page is stepping through different data because it's changing in between each page.

Now, lets say you get 5 rows out of 10, with values "0, 1, 2, 4, 5". What does it meant to get "the next page" minutes later? If you simply ask the database to "skip 5 rows and read the next 5", you could very well get back "-56, 2, 4, 7, 105" because god only knows what transactions have gone on since the first query. But if you say "get rows with values > max(previous result)" you might get "101,102,103,104,105" because so many rows have been inserted and deleted since then. Either way, the query has to be re-run, and neither query is guaranteed to return data that makes sense to a human user, or has valid relations to other data that was returned.

This kind of "feature request" is made by small-minded developers that have a) never read a text book, b) watched a production server processing $100M daily lock up, c) stayed up until 3am on Sunday fixing their mess. It's the kind of convenience feature that "works" until it either breaks everything in sight, or causes silent data loss or silent data corruption.

So please, before you tell me to get my head out of my ass, get some experience.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#110
post #97
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I want to play a game? I gotta hope proton supports it. Or use Photoshop, Lightroom or any other non Linux creative application. I guess I gotta learn the free alternatives. Also how's video acceleration in the browsers? Can I play a 4k60fps video? Is there HDR support? I use Linux everyday. But misrepresenting the desktop experience isn't going to get people to switch.

> I use Linux everyday. But misrepresenting the desktop experience isn't going to get people to switch. I really enjoy the endless battle with tearing, which sometimes is fixed, other times not. I also enjoy the battle of multi-monitor setup with different DPIs and scaling issues, mixing 1440p and 4k monitors. As for browser hardware acceleration, hell, even on Windows, Firefox (on my end, and for many others) have s…

I use Linux every day and your narrative doesn't add up.

I haven't done any configuration other than installing the GPU driver, that comes conveniently packaged in my distro. I don't have a Windows VM. I don't have a last generation video card or anything of the sort. This is my perspective:

1) HiDPI issues are indeed annoying, but in 2020 much of it is gone.

2) I don't have the video problem you are describing. 4K 60 fps YouTube videos play just fine on Firefox.

3) Some games are not compatible with Wine or Proton, sure. But the compatibility is getting better. See the list here: https://www.protondb.com/

For the people not familiar with Proton: everything you have to do is just open Steam, and open the game you want to play... that's all. Steam will run the game for you using Proton.

I haven't tried Doom eternal, but the previous Doom from 2016 runs out of the box with 60 fps, and I didn't have to touch any out-of-game configuration. Just installed it via Steam.

For Blizzard games like StarCraft II and Diablo run very well via WINE.

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