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Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

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Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#72
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still seeing regular releases. It's split into modules now, but the xorg-server module last had a release in April, I think, with multiple contributors, and at least two people are issuing release announcements. Maybe I'll consider Wayland again in a few years (though, who knows, by then maybe I'll have fallen for the temptation to write my own X server too...), but for now, Xorg works, receiving fixes, and does…

> It's still seeing regular releases. With very limited scope. There's already hardware out there that will likely never be properly supported by Xorg. Though Xwayland - and hence a big chunk of Xorg - will, of course, still live a long life.

Unfortunately Wayland means increased fragmentation in the hw support, not less :(

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#73
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PulseAudio has already been abandoned, the new thing is Pipewire. The specific issue with OSS was that it was never part of Linux and then with OSS 4 they made it proprietary, which killed it off entirely as far as Linux users are concerned. (FreeBSD cloned it instead.)

Oh yeah. I should have noticed that because on the Debian machine I set up for my daughter, audio suddenly broke, and it started working again when I removed pipewire. No joke, if you remove the new thing stuff magically starts working again.

in my experience, unlike pulseaudio, pipewire is way stabler and usually works fine with less involvement.

... except when you have accidentally ended up with half-pipewire, half-pulseaudio setup due to half-forgotten instructions that were no longer applicable.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#74
post #48

This might be a good place to ask this: So, the idea of Firefox Sync is almost cool, but what I'd like is literally everything EXACTLY "synced," down to the current state of every tab. Something like this feels like it should do it, but I've tried this and other things, and it just didn't work all that seamlessly. Has anyone accomplished anything like this for browsers and use it regularly?

I sync my entire firefox profile to multiple machines using syncthing

https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/

https://syncthing.net/

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not used Xpra, so I do not know if it has any problems with this, but a priori I do not see why an application like Xpra would need to be aware about the screen resolution. That should be handled by the X clients and servers. I have used only 4k monitors for more than 10 years in Linux and the only applications with which I frequently had problems were various programs written in Java by morons, which were usu…

The way Xpra works is that it's both a server and client in it's own right. So it needs to be aware for the final client involved to be able to learn about it from the other side of the chain, so it does need to be aware of it in order for applications to know that they need to adjust themselves. What this results in is that the client you're running through Xpra will just assume it's a normal 96 DPI display from yes…

X11 supports mixed DPI with the RANDR extension. Applications can use the per-monitor information provided by RANDR to get the DPI information for each output, and use this to calculate font and widget sizes. Everything looks nice as long as you don't have a window spanning multiple screens. The problem is that while Qt has supported this functionality since 5.9, GTK seemingly has no interest in implementing it and most other toolkits or raw Xlib programs don't support it either.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NICE DCV is a good alternative if you don't mind paying. I've found the image quality, latency and multi-monitor support to be better than NoMachine. You can get a permanent licence for $180. https://www.nice-dcv.com They are owned by Amazon Web Services.

NICE DCV is very solid but its licensing and links to AWS pushed me to write a replacement (it's just NVENC over UDP) one bored weekend... will have to OSS it some day. There's also RustDesk that looks great but I can't say I've used it yet.

Would love to hear more details and see the code.

I’ve found NICE DCV to be more performant on low end clients (eg chromebooks) maintaining good responsiveness vs RDP.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#78
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't yet seen any compelling reason to move off of X11. It's been years since I've checked - what's the current state of the art ?

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope is the one actually competent wayland WM.

And it works great as a standalone X11 server too.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm half-heartedly trying to RTFM of 'xpra', but haven't found the 'run_scaled' script yet. If it's not too much trouble, can you please reply with the commands you use to scale an X11 program? (I'm on Devuan Daedalus 5.0, ~= Debian Bookworm 12.0.) (I currently use 'xzoom' to scale X11 programs, but it's a little kludgy.) EDIT: Single quotes for all program names. Bookworm, not Bookwork.

https://github.com/kaueraal/run_scaled

This is the old, original version by me. xpra itself ships nowadays an improved version.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#80
post #74
post #48

This might be a good place to ask this: So, the idea of Firefox Sync is almost cool, but what I'd like is literally everything EXACTLY "synced," down to the current state of every tab. Something like this feels like it should do it, but I've tried this and other things, and it just didn't work all that seamlessly. Has anyone accomplished anything like this for browsers and use it regularly?

I sync my entire firefox profile to multiple machines using syncthing https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/ https://syncthing.net/

That's funny, I'm a heavy user of syncthing but never thought to try this. It doesn't get weird opening different executables on different machines?
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