RE: [gentoo-user] How to run X11 apps remotely?

[Laurence Perkins]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@×××××.com>
>Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2022 9:42 AM
>To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
>Subject: [gentoo-user] How to run X11 apps remotely?
>
>CAUTION: This is an EXTERNAL email. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
>
>How does one run "modern" X11 apps remotely?
>
>Using ssh -X or ssh -Y works fine for older applications, but not for things that use "modern" toolkits. Modern tookit designers appear to have adopted a life mission to maximize the number of client-server round-trips required for even a trivial event like a keystroke in a text box.
>
>As a result, even with a 5-10Mbps remote connection, it takes several minutes to enter a string of even a few characters. A mouseclick on a button can take a minute or two to get processed. Resizing a window pretty much means it's time for a cuppa.
>
>Opening chrome and loading a web page can take 10-15 minutes. No activity at all on the screen, but the network connection to the remote machine is saturated at 5Mbps for minutes at a time. WTF?
>
>Something like LibreOffice is completely unusable.
>
>Even something "lightweight" like atril is so slow it's barely usable.
>
>I do not want a "remote desktop". I just want to run a single application on a remote machine and have its window show up locally.
>
>Back in the day, I used to run X11 apps remotely through dial-up connections, and most of them were a little sluggish but still actually usable...
>
>X11 transparent network support was its killer feature, but for all practical purpopses, that feature seems to have been killed.
>
>--
>Grant
>

As you mentioned, it's a lot of extra round-trips.  Which means that it's not primarily your bandwidth that's the limiting factor, it's the latency.

Unfortunately, the speed of light being what it is, there are practical limits to what you can do about latency depending on how far apart the systems in question are.

But, check for and mitigate any bufferbloat issues you may have, that will spike your latency quite a bit.

The key back in the day was that people used X11 primitives directly.  But the X11 primitives are ugly, and there weren't any tools for making them pretty.  So rather than add those mechanisms all the toolkit authors just did their own thing and now everything is just bitmaps and practically no processing can be done locally.

Some programs like gVim will detect that they're running over SSH and fall back to basic X11 for the speed factor.  Not sure what browsers might do that.

LMP