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A native graphical shell for SSH

probablymarcus.com

121–130 of 239 posts

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#121

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 kind of dismissive comments is why many apps have an awful usability. If someone thinks a web interface would be easier than a text terminal, there's at least one customer in need for a product (which either doesn't exist or they could not "googlify") - it's also why I welcome AI generating apps on the fly, "replacing" engineers who "know better" ;)

Why learn to do anything?

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#122

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

that seems a little harsh. I think there is a real usability gap which this takes a crack at. Some ideas like using viewing a linux dir over _ssh_ using native UI components.. seem cool. I do agree, some of these do seem like they have already been solved in other ways (like an sshfs mount).

That is exactly what X was designed to do. And part of why X is considered insecure today.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#123

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 ?

A terminal UI is the best thing we pipe through SSH because it's the tool we built specifically for piping a terminal UI. Abandoning Xorg has admittedly made streaming a GUI over SSH less simple, but still not impossible, and you can forward whatever data you want (a VLC stream of a 4k movie) with tunneling.

I do agree that new Linux users who have different needs from their computers might cause some incentive to change some of these 40 year old UX decisions. We don't really have a modern, capable remote desktop solution at least on par with RDP.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#124
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.

Any experience with ‘programmers’ not knowing git?

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#125

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

that seems a little harsh. I think there is a real usability gap which this takes a crack at. Some ideas like using viewing a linux dir over _ssh_ using native UI components.. seem cool. I do agree, some of these do seem like they have already been solved in other ways (like an sshfs mount).

I mean, I do this all the time via sshfs. I don't think these tools or ideas are bad, they just mostly aren't new, the innovation is maybe a particular ux or a particular bundle of toys?

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#127

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 kind of dismissive comments is why many apps have an awful usability. If someone thinks a web interface would be easier than a text terminal, there's at least one customer in need for a product (which either doesn't exist or they could not "googlify") - it's also why I welcome AI generating apps on the fly, "replacing" engineers who "know better" ;)

> there's at least one customer in need for a product

just because whales exist does not mean feeding them is a goal to aim for as a society. 99.9% of technology could disappear tomorrow and life would become better.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#128

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 ?

>character-only trash from 1960s

You take that back!

>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?

The old magick speak of X forwarding. The newer wizards now use waypipe.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#129
post #33
post #24

I like the idea of separating the frontend and backend of a graphical app. But I feel like this is hardly a novel idea, maybe I'm missing something. I take it you don't know about "X11Forwarding yes" or "html5 web app" For browsers, capabilities like connecting to Unix sockets have been dismissed as extremely niche That is a security concern, that's why it isn't implemented. At least raw unix socks. You can have WebS…

Quick response regarding security: On various Mozilla forums that I saw, the discussion was basically: 1. We can't just allow the browser to connect to any socket, since many either explicitly don't want browsers connecting to them, or are oblivious to browsers. 2. ...so we need to also add some sort of allow list 3. ...this is getting too complicated for such a niche feature. So I think the nicheness was the high-or…

JavaScript and wasm should not be able to open generalized networks sockets because no one wants an asshole to be able to buy an ad on a shitty ad network and send malicious code to people’s browsers which attacks all the internal devices on the user’s network simply because the user wanted to read a movie review.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#130

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

It's like they decided to reinvent webmin
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