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On 2022-03-22, Laurence Perkins <lperkins@×××××××.net> wrote: |
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>>Even something "lightweight" like atril is so slow it's barely usable. |
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>> |
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>>I do not want a "remote desktop". I just want to run a single |
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>>application on a remote machine and have its window show up locally. |
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>> |
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>>Back in the day, I used to run X11 apps remotely through dial-up |
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>>connections, and most of them were a little sluggish but still |
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>>actually usable... |
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>> |
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>>X11 transparent network support was its killer feature, but for all |
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>>practical purpopses, that feature seems to have been killed. |
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> As you mentioned, it's a lot of extra round-trips. Which means that |
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> it's not primarily your bandwidth that's the limiting factor, it's |
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> the latency. |
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> |
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> Unfortunately, the speed of light being what it is, there are |
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> practical limits to what you can do about latency depending on how |
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> far apart the systems in question are. |
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Where "far" is measured more in in hops than miles. :) |
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Even with cut-through routing, each hop can be expensive. Add a couple |
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firewalls with stateful packet inpsection, and latency from my house |
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to the house next door isn't great. |
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> But, check for and mitigate any bufferbloat issues you may have, |
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> that will spike your latency quite a bit. |
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> |
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> The key back in the day was that people used X11 primitives |
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> directly. But the X11 primitives are ugly, and there weren't any |
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> tools for making them pretty. |
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Yea, I remember. I wrote a couple xlib apps way back back when and it |
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was painful. Even the old Xt toolkit wasn't fun. I do appreciate how |
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easy it is to slap together something in Python and Gtk, I just wish |
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it worked remotely after it was done. :) |
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> So rather than add those mechanisms all the toolkit authors just did |
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> their own thing and now everything is just bitmaps and practically |
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> no processing can be done locally. |
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> |
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> Some programs like gVim will detect that they're running over SSH |
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> and fall back to basic X11 for the speed factor. Not sure what |
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> browsers might do that. |
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Things like Xemacs are still usable, but if I'm doing emacs, I usually |
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just run it directly in an ssh "terminal". |
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