[alphablended]

> No, I'd say X11 wasn't designed to be run on the network [...]

That's just wrong. X11 was designed from the ground up to be used on the network. It just happens that nowadays requirements are different from when it was originally designed.

Running X11 on the network was quite a thing in Unis all over the world, where you could have dedicated dozens of X11 graphic terminal servers (tektronix used to make good ones) connected (100Mbits) to a single mainframe, and everyone running an Xemacs session without slowdown.

Wayland design is all about framebuffers, which clearly shows how focus has shifted. X11 was not designed for pixmap heavy, shader heavy scenarios.

[ekidd]

Also, X networking was mostly used within local university and company networks, and not over the internet backbone. Well-designed local networks can be very low latency, often noticeably lower latency than disk I/O.

[alphablended]

Well, I don't think that network at the time was faster than SCSI, but that's a fair point that X11 isn't quite "internet ready" (though these days with a dedicated VPN you'd probably get very good performance on the core protocol).

[spacedcowboy]

To be fair, X doesn't work that well over even local networks with modern apps.

Serving X applications (eg: Chromium) from the Raspberry Pi I'm targeting to the Mac I'm developing on is an exercise in futility, even if it does make 'download this to the target' easier. It's a lot faster to run Safari on the Mac and scp the download to the Pi, just because of interface latency issues.

[steve1977]

I remember running Hummingbird Exceed on Windows to access the “proper” applications on Solaris in a stock trading environment (like 25 years ago)