[somat]

Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this"

And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare X server, only the encrusted, encapsulated ones tied down for desktop use. best I can describe it is having a a shared network attached monitor. I was using it sort like you would have a large central status display in an operations center, but small, on a phone.

If curious, I wanted to monitor system temps while playing a full screen game using the excellent but unsearchable "trend" program.

http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/

[imglorp]

Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.

[somat]

I think the arcan project is doing good work here. But honestly I suspect the days of networks attached displays is slowly coming to an end. Our modern alternative is probably the web, where you ship the program to the display server to run on it.

https://arcan-fe.com/about/

[jraph]

Unfortunately, as far as old iPads are concerned, one of the major issues with old iPads is the old safari version. And so old web standards. I've this potentially nice projects to mirror screens from the web browser, but they won't run on old iPads for this reason. Shipping programs to the old iPad will suffer the same issues: only programs specifically written for these old Safari versions will work.

I suspect this will be an issue for most old devices. Especially old Apple devices (though there's hope for the newer ones now that the EU requires them to allow other browsers), but for all devices ultimately.

[heavyset_go]

Check out waypipe[1] if you haven't.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

[derriz]

It was amazing. Multiple applications running on different servers/machines all working side-by-side on a single desktop workstation. Effectively every GUI application could automatically be run in "client-server mode" (using the terms in the traditional sense not the inverted-X11 sense) without having to write any architecture or OS specific client code.

Although technologically completely unrelated, rich browser applications also fill this niche, and even share warts like the lack of standardized UX behaviors or having issues with dealing with (subtle) difference between "client environment" implementations (different browsers or X11 "servers").

Effectively the web browser became the universal "graphical terminal" in the same way as (in the past) serial TTYs were the universal "textual terminal". Thus X11's "killer app" just slowly became irrelevant.

[fragmede]

oh man, between mosh and xpra at university, I thought that's how the future was gonna be.

[bitwize]

It's called HTTP+HTML+CSS+JavaScript :)

[KaiserPro]

Oh man it was fucking great.

I had a shitty pentium or mmx, with fuck all ram, my dad however had a DUAL PROC P3 monster just a network hop away.

I could SSH in and run GIMP on his machine and run https://logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer/removal in a quarter of the time.

But that time has passed now. Perhaps web APIs are the best way to do that kinda offload.