Discuss Digest, Vol 37, Issue 7

[Mark Woodward]

On 11/07/2010 12:00 PM, discuss-request-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org wrote:
> Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2010 08:20:03 -0500
> From: Matthew Gillen<me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org>
> Subject: Re: Ubuntu moving away from X
> To:discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org
> Message-ID:<4CD6A783.4010106-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 11/07/2010 07:53 AM, Mark Woodward wrote:
>    
>> >  On 11/06/2010 08:07 AM,discuss-request-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org  wrote:
>>      
>>> >>  This is not because XQuartz is terrible.  This is because the X applications are terrible.  I say that as a daily user of exactly this combination.  It's how I get my Xterms and my occasional Guild Wars fix, among many other things including remote X clients.
>>> >>  
>>>        
>> >  "X Applications are terrible?" Really? OpenOffice, Firefox, Gimp,
>> >  Thunderbird, etc. are terrible applications? I have to disagree.
>>      
> The point was that those are all GTK apps, and if GTK supported whatever X
> replacement transparently to GTK's API layer, then OO, Firefox, Gimp, etc
> would never notice.  None of those apps use X directly AFAIK; they only use
> it through their toolkit (in this case, GTK).
>    
So, when Ubuntu drops X, all these GTK applications will no longer work 
remotely. That's just great.
> So there is a real possibility that 98% of the applications you use could
> actually natively support something other than X fairly easily, if only GTK
> and QT support it on their backend (wouldn't even necessarily require a
> re-compile of the apps, only a drop-in replacement of the GTK/Qt
> implementation).
>
> There are a couple 'real' X applications that I use every now and then (xfig
> anyone?), but a slight performance hit on those wouldn't bother me.  Think
> of it this way: if it's old enough to use raw X, than modern computers are
> almost certainly hefty enough to virtualize it several times over before
> you'd notice.
>
> I agree that the X-forwarding functionality is a core feature, and it kicks
> VNC-like (i.e. bitmap-based) solutions in the pants.  I'm not convinced that
> they couldn't come up with something comparable that worked for Wayland.
> The trouble would be backwards compatibility: I want my shiny new desktop
> with Wayland to display X apps from my 5-year-old server.  That's a place
> where emulation or adding layers might start to hurt.
>    

I have and do use X remoting a lot. I have run firefox, openoffice, 
gimp, thunderbird, and other applications across the internet in a 
pinch. I run these apps locally and in my office on a regular basis. I 
often run apps on my desktop and display them on my laptop to save from 
copying data back and forth.

Once they make the default applications for Ubuntu to work directly with 
Wayland, they won't work with X remoting. So, anyone who wants those 
features will be forced to get and support different versions.


> Matt
>