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Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

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Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#91
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xrdp + rdesktop is my current daily driver for this

Xrdp is really good. I'm amazed by the quantity of different Linux remote desktop solutions covered in this thread. Is the fragmentation a good sign of a healthy ecosystem?

I find xrdp quite slow esp compared to a Windows RDP server. This is with the xrdp that comes with Debian 12. Maybe newer versions are faster.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#92
post #38

Okay, but X11 is deprecated. Is there a modern version?

At the risk of threadjacking, I'd still love to have a real conversation about how and why this Wayland thing happened (and is still arguably happening) so badly . Specifically, how -- again, in LINUX-LAND -- a whole bunch of people decided, "nah, we're going to go ahead and break the HELL OUT OF backwards compatibility this time, even though we pretty much never do this."

And chose an architecture really interesting where everybody will recode an half-baked version of the work-in-progress protocol so each desktop-env/window-manager will have different compatibility characteristics; and where tons of actual implementation mix the graphic server with the desktop-env/window-manager so that crashes are extra fun.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#93
post #38

Okay, but X11 is deprecated. Is there a modern version?

At the risk of threadjacking, I'd still love to have a real conversation about how and why this Wayland thing happened (and is still arguably happening) so badly . Specifically, how -- again, in LINUX-LAND -- a whole bunch of people decided, "nah, we're going to go ahead and break the HELL OUT OF backwards compatibility this time, even though we pretty much never do this."

I think a couple of people hired to to work on Linux graphics did not like dealing with legacy code (who does?) and somehow convinced their incompetent managers that everything has to be rewritten.^1 This went just like most "let's just rewrite it and it will be much simpler and better" IT projects. Now 15 years later or so we have a fundamentally inferior replacement (with probably nicer code though) which still misses essential features and plays catch up a, a simultaneously a serious lack of investment into maintenance of X, and also a lack of investment into user visible features in apps (I think gnomes pdf viewer gets its third rewrite, but still can't play embedded videos in presentation mode).

A lot of the user community was fooled into believing that Wayland would make graphics and gaming much better any day now ^2, which never really was based on sound technical arguments.

^1 This was roughly the time when everybody wanted to build new phone or tables operating systems to capitalize on an emerging mobile market. So maintaining stability for the desktop wasn't a priority.

^2 With grotesque nonsense claims about X such that the old drawing API slow apps down even though they are unused, etc. Those "arguments" were endlessly repeated and you can still see this even here, also everybody who ever implemented a GUI application in Linux should realize that this can not be true.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#94
post #91
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xrdp is really good. I'm amazed by the quantity of different Linux remote desktop solutions covered in this thread. Is the fragmentation a good sign of a healthy ecosystem?

I find xrdp quite slow esp compared to a Windows RDP server. This is with the xrdp that comes with Debian 12. Maybe newer versions are faster.

I'm using the same as you - Debian 12. The only snag I've noticed is that it's pretty easy to make a session crash, at which point you lose the entire desktop.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#95
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux actually does this a lot. Jwz called it "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" more than 20 years ago, describing GNOME. Look at audio. PulseAudio is mostly pointless and over-engineered. Breaks a lot. You could say the same about ALSA even. FreeBSD meanwhile is still using the OSS API that Linux was on in the late 90s...

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.)

> The specific issue with OSS was that it was never part of Linux

Huh?

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#96

Okay, but X11 is deprecated. Is there a modern version?

Oh god, has the "rewrite it in rust" crowd finally learned about wayland?

I wish rust people spent their time writing software instead of going around telling other people to do the job for them. They only manage to get others annoyed with this attitude.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#97
post #95
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.)

> The specific issue with OSS was that it was never part of Linux Huh?

Iirc there was a version in the kernel tree, then "upstream" if you could even call it that developed it further (OSS 4.0). I think there was a company behind it and a nonfree license. Obviously that was a no-go for inclusion into mainline Linux.

But alsa was/is also enormously complicated with a huge library, user mode plugins and whatnot. It reminds me of a common problem that people have where they think API and implementation are one and the same, and that you cannot swap out a different implementation keeping the simple API. People would say you need alsa because it does software mixing, but the lack of software mixing wasn't an OSS API problem, it was a problem with how it was implemented.

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#98
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe my dist-upgrade got it into such a state. I'll try to check that out.

I ended up solving a similar case for someone else, where ultimately different programs were fighting over control of the sound devices themselves.

I have to say, that pipewire under NixOS had been easier to deal with than both pulseaudio and ALSA on crappy internal sound devices (i.e. ones requiring dmix and the like). It's nearly as plug&play as ALSA on "proper" soundcard was (like when I got a Dell Precision to work with that somehow had a Creative Audigy with 256 channel sound, so no need for dmix at all...)

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god, has the "rewrite it in rust" crowd finally learned about wayland?

I wish rust people spent their time writing software instead of going around telling other people to do the job for them. They only manage to get others annoyed with this attitude.

Could I get an example of this?

Re: Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11

#100
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.

Considering that hardware vendors are typically writing and upstreaming their own drivers, I don't see how that could be.
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