logoalt Hacker News

throw0101atoday at 4:13 PM2 repliesview on HN

> It depends on what you mean by send.

Currently I can:

    $ ssh -X somehost xeyes
and get a window on macOS.

Replies

NoGravitastoday at 4:48 PM

Today you would do:

`$ waypipe ssh somehost foot`

You need waypipe installed on both machines. For the Mac, I guess you'll need something like cocoa-way (https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way). Some local Wayland compositor, anyway.

gf000today at 7:19 PM

For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it.

X's network transparency was made at a time when we drawn two lines as UI, and for that it works very well. But today even your Todo app has a bunch of icons that are just bitmaps to X, and we can transfer those via much better means (that should probably not be baked into a display protocol).

I think Wayland did the correct decision here. Just be a display protocol that knows about buffers and that's it.

User space can then just transport buffers in any way they seem fit.

Also, another interesting note, the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web, if you look at it squinted. And quite a few programs just simply expose a localhost port to avoid the "native GUI" issue wholesale.

show 2 replies