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A native graphical shell for SSH

probablymarcus.com

181–190 of 239 posts

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any experience with ‘programmers’ not knowing git?

When I went to college (early 2010s) professors were still encouraging students to use SVN, so I probably have a fair number of peers who didn't learn git until they got out into the real world

Was the encouragement to use SVN to the detriment of git, or was it to the detriment of renaming the file multiple times, from final to final (1).zip to final-no-really-this-is-it.zip?

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#182
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.

Any experience with ‘programmers’ not knowing git?

Had experience with programmers not knowing VCS in general.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#183
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very, very thin web layer on top of native code: https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/features.html To the author's defense: Cockpit is Linux only, and they seem to intend on making this also available on Windows and Mac. Still, I don't see the appeal they seem to do, especially since it relies so much on SSH. The biggest use case I can think for something like this in the real world is something like firs…

Windows has quite a lot of remote admin tools that work pretty transparently over the network though. The issue is that they're historically never turned on or heavily restricted. Where the user is involved though RDP is a world class remote desktop never exceeded by Linux anywhere. If someone wants to impress me, point Claude at Wayland and get it so I can seamlessly open remote RDP from somewhere else, lock the loc…

Yeah, RDP is great. Sunshine has basically solved this problem for me on Linux, even with {way,hypr}land (haven't tried on macos yet)

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#184

It is pretty annoying to see all of the dismissive comments on this idea, in that it seems that the majority of HN audience are still stuck on the TUI-superiority mindset and they do not care about GUIs at all. Two arguments: - TUIs are not inherently superior to GUIs - SSH, as a transport layer, should support not just forwarding a pty (as a TUI display layer), but a GUI display layer as well In fact, these two argu…

> theoretically, it would be possible to run the main process separated from the renderer process on a different machine, with an appropriate IPC transport. Is this really possible? If Electron apps could do this, and we could run them on a Linux SBC like RPI with the renderer on the user's laptop, that would be interesting ...

Isn't this is basically every webpage with a backend component, just displaced one more layer? I suspect the main reason this doesn't make sense is that it would take an order of magnitude more bandwidth as opposed to just sending data like we do right now. Data has repetitive patterns which means it's often well compressibile as well.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#185
Terminal people forget how hostile SSH is to anyone who didn't learn it in college.

If this lowers the floor for small teams managing a VPS without hiring a platform person, that's a win. I'm just curious how it handles keys and jump hosts.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

apt install putty seems... useful? Don't get it.

PuTTY is (or was, in the years before WSL) the go-to SSH client for Windows. If you're a Windows user getting onboarded at a job / uni class which uses Linux machines, installing it is the first thing you'd be told. The laptop in question would obviously have a terminal emulator and SSH client pre-installed, but a Windows user wouldn't think to look for them, and they might not even know that SSH exists outside of PuTTY or that it's a separate concept to the terminal.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#187
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the sense that typesetting and text is the rabbit hole that is 90% of UI effort. Native UI frameworks don't bother fixing the real hard problems, they focus on "widgets" instead. (Not that the web stack is a good solution to this, but at least they're making an effort and they understand the difficult issues.)

> Native UI frameworks don't bother fixing the real hard problems I'm genuinely curious what do you mean by that. My beef with web stack was exactly this - typesetting engine from 80s has been never designed for modern UI/UX needs, and it cannot adequately provide those. Whenever I interact with web apps, I experience so many glitches, weird interaction issues (especially if there is a zoom/selection/scrool involved)…

I mean if we wanted a good UI/UX framework we'd have to start from typesetting, not add it later as an afterthought to our button and text area widgets.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

> Why a TUI is the best thing we pipe through ssh? `ssh -XC` (look up SSH X forwarding). You can also easily tunnel remote desktop over ssh. > Why I cannot watch a 4k movie in the terminal or browse the web using pinch to zoom ? Kitty, sixel, and iterm2

It's not 4k, but ssh to funky.nondeterministic.computer if you're using a modern* terminal emulator program. (aka ghostty)

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

because it is TEXT you want your GUI then set up VNC

The problem with VNC is the same as the problem with IRC. The new user experience is trash. They're both on the level of protocols, like SMTP is, so you get variable support for user quality of life features and users bounce because those features aren't built into the protocol. For VNC, it's per window support and image compression format/acceleration. For IRC it's pre-join-history scrollback, and anything you need a moderation bot for. SMTP's problem is spam. (Doesn't matter if that's a problem with the protocol or the wider situation and should be managed at the application level, it sucks for users.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why ssh terminal has to look like character-only trash from 1960s? We should re-implement it with Comic Sans and happy shiny buttons to click everywhere? Click here for "ls -alh" ?

No, but I wouldn't mind if keyboard worked properly.

Where keyboard no work?
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