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by froseph 1065 days ago
One I dont see mentioned is Xnest (or its successor Xephyr). In a previous life, used it all the time to debug apps in multiple desktop environments.
3 comments
lelanthran 1065 days ago
Good one.

I recall, around 2004, using it on Windows, under Cygwin, to run cygwin-compiled X apps on Windows.

I'm not sure how that worked at all, to be honest. I hope my memory is not playing tricks on me again.

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philsnow 1065 days ago
My (less-than-half-baked) master's thesis has a screenshot of Xnest, which I was using to demonstrate some ridiculously primitive precursor to kernel namespaces, IIRC
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xioxox 1065 days ago
I like xvfb-run which runs GUI X11 applications in a headless mode.
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philsnow 1065 days ago
One of my favorite bits of software is Xpra [0], "screen for X". You'd run it and it would start another X server (start apps in it with `DISPLAY=:1 xterm` or whatever), and you would "attach" it to your running X server with `xpra attach`.

You can attach to e.g. `ssh://hostname/:1`, so I ran a firefox instance on a homelab server and attached to it from my laptop and my desktop to not have to bother keeping bookmarks, tabs etc in sync.

[0] https://xpra.org/

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