[TUHS] X, Suntools, and the like

[Josh Good]

On 2017 Mar 15, 09:40, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> 
> Your usage habits are not natural laws.  I'm a systems administrator
> too, and I use X11 forwarding every single day, on dozens of different
> programs.  
> 
> It's all very well for X11's networking tools to be useless for you.
> That doesn't make them useless in general, and it doesn't mean the
> functionality should be deleted.

I don't use X11 forwarding because it works bad/slow over WAN links,
but RDP/ICA works just fine over the same. Also, in X11 forwarding any
network hiccup means the X11 app you are remoting just crashes, that
does not happen in the RDP/ICA world.

The real problem is that X11 predates the "GUI desktop metaphor". In X11
forwarding you remote bitmaps (or vectors or primitives or whatever)
which belong to an app, whereas in RDP you remote bitmaps (and only
bitmaps, and never anything more than bitmaps) which belong to a "full,
self-contained, GUI desktop".

In my opinion, X11 is not appropriate for desktops --it is designed more
for a scientific workstation kind of thing--, but currently there is
just no mature alternative in the Unix/Linux world (except for Mac OS X,
of course).

-- 
Josh Good