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X410 – X Server for Windows 10

x410.dev

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Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but is that also the case for mobile Intel CPUs? I was unsure so I said "some" rather than "most."

I wasn't aware Intel still made "Desktop-AddIn cards", or that the Non-Mobile versions are in any relevant way different to the mobile versions. In any case, the page I linked above does not seem to draw a distinction. So I assume, mobile versions are good to go too. Heard/read about differing experiences?

I have it setup on my Thinkpad T580, seems to work fine enough. I do get the occasional visual corruption with it but it works well enough for me to run things like Luminar and other photo editing things that need hardware acceleration. It doesn't seem to work reliably with video encoding, which might just be a driver issue somewhere that I haven't found a solution for yet.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't really work for laptops, at least without a lot of research and fiddling. You need a desktop with at least one GPU, for the guest. If you want to run the host as GUI, instead of headless, then you need a GPU for the host as well. You can shut down each guest and boot up another one but generally you'll need a GPU for each guest you want to run with a GUI, if you want proper hardware acceleration and if you w…

In a World where virtualization has allowed to run several virtual machines on one physical machine (not even high-end) for 15+ years, it looks like a strange concept to need one physical piece of hardware per VM. I actually understand why it makes sense, simplification and best performance for GPU intensive context, yet it feels like "let's virtualize, not really".

The real reason is money, as it usually is. Nvidia and AMD GPUs can in fact split their resources per VM - if only you buy their enterprise/research versions of their cards, like Quadro and Firepro. Most people have no need of VM GPU passthrough, so they don't support it for consumer cards. Intel does because they are not really in the graphics space (not yet anyway, we'll see how Xe does).

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GVT-g works on my mobile Intel GPU.

Do you, or anyone, happen to know, if WSL2 (=HyperV), or any other Hypervisor on Windows supports GVT-g (well), so that (wsl2) linux applications running on-guest can benefit from hardware assisted rendering?

WSL 2 does not support GPU pass through currently. I'm not sure if Hyper V does either, but this seems like it will change soon due to Windows 10 X. There has been development where for emulated Win32 apps they do use GPU / hardware acceleration. Sadly, with the the Neo being delayed past 2020, we might not see it until next year.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what Wine does (and it often works surprisingly well).

I run Windows applications that require USB hardware, and Wine does not support USB devices. so I was hoping for native Windows execution rendered to an X Server.

Run windows in a VM with USB pass through?

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Cygwin, not WSL. I don't think those two are compatible. I think people want the actual Linux you can get with WSL, not a pseudo-Linux like Cygwin.

This would be a correct comment in other contexts but you seem to be unaware of the architecture of X. You can run an X server under cygwin and X clients under WSL.

I did not know this. Makes sense now. Thanks for explaining it.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#226
post #208
post #206

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Follow-up: I read more moderation comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... which gave me a better idea of why using personal details in arguments would degrade discussions here. That made me change my mind and I’ll not do it again. I maintain that the parent comment is toxic and disappointing for the community.

Thanks for looking at those comments and getting them; you have no idea how much I appreciate that! I agree that the GP comment was a shallow dismissal, and those often lead to generic subthreads, which tend to attract upvotes and replies and generally change the subject to a more generic topic, which is bad. Most of the damage is in the upvotes, actually, because the biggest problem comes from such a comment sitting…

Thank you for your understanding. Will shoot an email instead of fighting back next time.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#227
post #70

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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…

> ...rules-lawyering the GPL. Redistributing "their" source, as allowed by the GPL, is liable for your support license to not get renewed. There isn't anything wrong with that at all. If someone is undermining RedHat's business model it is reasonable for RedHat not to support them. The spirit of the GPL is the source code should be available and the user can do what they like with it. RedHat makes the source code ava…

The reverse is not expected.

The spirit of the GPL is to make source code available. Why? So that anyone can maintain the software. Thus there's an expectation (however naive) that the code is in a usable format because that's kind of the point of having the source. RedHat, however, provides the source in an obtuse format, a format that isn't even how it's used it internally. That is to say, they go above and beyond, in order to make their source harder to use. I'd say that pretty directly violates the spirit, if not the letter of the GPL.

The other part is that the GPL explicitly grants customers the right to redistribute the changes. That's pretty wild. Buying a DVD copy of Avengers doesn't give me the right to setup Avengersflix.com and sell subscriptions. GPL software does. RedHat then turns around and says if you actually do that, then fuck you (paraphrased a bit). They are entirely within their rights to do that, but if you're telling me the spirit of the GPL gives me a right that I'm not actually supposed to exercise, then we'll just have to disagree. (Un)forunately for me, the legal system looks at the letter of the GPL rather than the spirit, so what Redhat's doing is legal.

Why does the GPL explicitly grant that permission if it isn't meant to be exercised? Why did RedHat choose the GPL?

They didn't, is the answer. It chose them. The two fundamental pieces, GNU libc and the Linux kernel, are LGPL and GPLv2 licensed, respectively, along with many other packages, and relicensing them is not something RedHat has the rights to do.

Hence, RedHat's strong-arm tactics to force people into buying expensive support contracts.

There's nothing legally wrong with what they're doing but it's still a dick move by RedHat. Sure, RedHat's dick move is in response to Oracle's dick move, but two wrongs don't make a right. They do make a billion dollar business though.

There are other more opinionated licenses that RedHat could adopt for new software that they do own the copyright to. For the conscientious objector software developer, there's the idea of the Non-Military Open Source License which says the military is not allowed to use the software. There's the AGPL, which is a further left license that says if you use my website, I owe you the source, and all modifications to it. Hell, RedHat can afford the lawyers to write their own license that says companies started by Larry Ellison aren't allowed access to the source.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, that was probably at least a year ago. For all intents and purposes, it's $10. I've also been pretty happy with it, and substantive new features are added regularly. There's a couple little annoyances from the design assumption that the user's main interest is WSL, but for the most part, it's been much smoother than the other X11-for-Win32 variants. Support was recently added for listening on a hyperv vsock, bu…

What do you mean by "reverse the tunnel" and what would you hope to get done with it?

It sounds like they mean running X apps on the Linux host displayed in a Windows VM.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> X also doesn't really work if you UI is implemented with OpenGL or similar. Depends on how you use the OpenGL API. OpenGL display lists, once compiled, are extremly light on the connection. However they're also deprecreated and no longer supported in (forward compatible) OpenGL-3.3 core. But then again there's no 3.3 GLX specification.

For the stuff I'm doing (image processing), indirect GL is not an option.

What about VirtualGL? https://www.virtualgl.org/

As I understand it, when you open an OpenGL application inside Xvnc (et al) on :1, a shim is LD_PRELOADed that quietly redirects the OpenGL initialization calls so they create an offscreen buffer associated with Xorg at :0 (which is presumably sitting on a 3D-capable GPU).

Said Xorg can be displaying a black screen (or be being used for arbitrary purposes); no windows are ever displayed on it. Theoretically, avoiding compositing WMs may aid performance.

Re: X410 – X Server for Windows 10

#230
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.

You will be playing your favorite game with HDR enabled, and suddenly... it's auto update time! See you in 30 minutes. I just watched a 4k60 fps YouTube video just fine. I am surprised you didn't mention office suites. Softmaker Office/FreeOffice are very similar to MS Office, just 99.9% more responsive and less bloated.

Do you honestly believe that Windows update works like that? Windows 10 came out in 2015. And has had twice yearly updates since then.

Perhaps then I should compare Ubuntu 14.04 to Windows 10 today.

Really? What GPU? Free or non free driver? Wayland or Xorg? It ain't simple.

Why didn't I mention office suites? Because they're not really that demanding. Text editors aren't a high bar.

If the latest version of Office lags on your PC that's capable of running 4k60 video then there's something wrong with your PC.

But of course I use it on my work laptop. On my personal PC, Google docs does everything I need.

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