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A native graphical shell for SSH

probablymarcus.com

71–80 of 239 posts

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#71

This appears to me like a solution in search of a problem, like many others before it...the quote below seems relevant to this effort. "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." ~Henry Spencer

No. It’s just that now more people are using Linux the more the ux decisions that were made 40 years ago will be questioned.

Almost all dev facing machines have ssh server installed and accessible.

Why ssh terminal has to look like character-only trash from 1960s? Why a TUI is the best thing we pipe through ssh? Why I cannot watch a 4k movie in the terminal or browse the web using pinch to zoom ?

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#72
I'm actually way more interested in option 2 - the VNC-like experience.

TUI apps are convenient over SSH because they're right there in your terminal. But they suck because they're restricted to shitty monospaced character grids. Why can't we have something more like VNC over SSH? Like, `top` and `micro` but with good graphics?

I did try doing something like that with the Kitty graphics protocol and you can get kind of close..ish, but it's really restricted by having to send everything as PNGs.

Anyway upvote for not being blinkered and thinking terminals are just for CLI stuff and must be forever.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#73

This appears to me like a solution in search of a problem, like many others before it...the quote below seems relevant to this effort. "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." ~Henry Spencer

I hired a programmer and after giving him his Linux laptop let him set up a few things. A couple hours later he asked me where he could get PuTTY for it, and I recognized a huge gap in my interview coverage.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#75

Author apparently has never heard about Cockpit. Everything they mention as "missing", or "novel" has been part of Cockpit for over a decade, from socket-based web server connection, backend-frontend separation for server apps and the whole idea of a server console with shell access itself. To answer them: "Isn’t it weird that this doesn’t already exist?" - No, it's not, because it has existed for ages.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Sincerely, HN Guidelines Police :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#76
post #73

This appears to me like a solution in search of a problem, like many others before it...the quote below seems relevant to this effort. "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." ~Henry Spencer

I hired a programmer and after giving him his Linux laptop let him set up a few things. A couple hours later he asked me where he could get PuTTY for it, and I recognized a huge gap in my interview coverage.

Indeed, a new hire should be able to use Google to find https://puttygen.com/download-putty#Download_PuTTY_on_Linux_... in short order

evil grin

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#77
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. A shell is any user interface. Windows shell is explorer.exe and it used to be possible to change that via a config line in a system INI file. SSH protocol also isn’t just for CLI work. It supports file transport (eg SFTP), TCP/IP forwarding and even SOCKS HTTP proxying. You also used to be able to run GUI applications over SSH via X11.

You have a very loose definition of a shell that conflicts with about 40 years of history.

Why do you think GNOME Shell is called GNOME Shell?

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell

(just as one example)

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#78
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hired a programmer and after giving him his Linux laptop let him set up a few things. A couple hours later he asked me where he could get PuTTY for it, and I recognized a huge gap in my interview coverage.

Indeed, a new hire should be able to use Google to find https://puttygen.com/download-putty#Download_PuTTY_on_Linux_... in short order evil grin

multiple issues right

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#79

This appears to me like a solution in search of a problem, like many others before it...the quote below seems relevant to this effort. "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." ~Henry Spencer

I think this is a `There’s no such thing as bad publicity`

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#80

This appears to me like a solution in search of a problem, like many others before it...the quote below seems relevant to this effort. "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." ~Henry Spencer

This resembles Plan9 more than UNIX. I wouldn't put UNIX up on a pedestal.

Plan9 is funny because it's what UNIX might look like if the people working on UNIX understood UNIX, i.e. everything is a file and simple primitives are composed into complex systems.
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