[roywiggins]

Even easier is just using an X server, if you have it set up properly you just need to run the remote app and the window pops up on your machine.

(I think terminal-based GUIs are neat just for fluidity of use- you can pop one open during a terminal session and close it without switching to mouse or shifting your attention away from the terminal. They can also be a nice addon to a primarily CLI utility without introducing big dependencies)

[wolvoleo]

Yeah I love that about X. I remember in the 90s when I first figured that out. I was logged in from a university workstation into my home computer with SSH and I launched my mail client or something and I thought doh, stupid that will only popup locally.

Then colour my suprise when it popped up on my screen right there. Slow as molasses but still. Wow. Magic.

It's a shame Wayland dropped this. Yes I know there's waypipe but it's not the same.

[coldpie]

> It's a shame Wayland dropped this.

It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days, there's a reason approximately no one has used remote X after the mid-90s. It's a neat party trick, but I don't blame the Wayland authors for not wanting to support it.

[cbm-vic-20]

> one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows

In the 80s/90s this wasn't feasible due to network latency and bandwidth, but it's pretty common now to do exactly this, with VNC and other remote desktop protocols.

[wolvoleo]

It is, there were tools like NX that made it entirely usable even latencywise. And these days we're really going more and more to remote computing.

In the time when wayland was invented it made sense because we did everything purely local. But now it's as outdated as X11 was in 2010.

And yes I still use it a lot. It works well. Networks have become a lot better and even most cloud compute I use is geographically nearby.

What made it slow back then was that I only had a 128kbit uplink at home. And the uni had 2 mbit for the whole computer science building :)

[pseudalopex]

> In the time when wayland was invented it made sense because we did everything purely local.

People complained of no forwarding in Wayland when it was invented.

[duskdozer]

Like what? X forwarding has pretty much always been the thing most likely to work for me and I haven't been able to find any equivalent.

[coldpie]

The big obvious one is web-based tooling. Your information & settings are stored on a server and you use a web browser to view it via whatever device you're on. For more locally based workflows, we have networked filesystem protocols, automatic syncing between systems, that kind of thing. It's not a 1-1 equivalent of running a remote program and viewing it locally obviously, but it gets the same job done, in a much more useful & flexible manner than X forwarding did.

For example, the remote mail client usecase I was replying to is simply done with a webmail client today.

[duskdozer]

I don't really feel like web interfaces or syncing are really a substitute tbh, and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens, and the program itself doesn't need to be designed differently to work

[coldpie]

> and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens

But this doesn't work on your phone, or on a Windows or macOS device, right? That's what I meant by flexible, X forwarding fits a pretty narrow set of usecases, while on the other hand keeping programs on the clients and data centrally located on a server allows for a whole lot more options for how to interface with that data.

(To be clear, nothing wrong with X forwarding! It's a cool tech and I'm glad you have a use for it! I'm just arguing that it's fine for Wayland to not try to support that kind of thing, because we've got other ways of working remotely now.)

[tracker1]

IIRC, it's not that secure though.. I'm really surprised people didn't do more things like send animated skulls to people's desktops.

[wolvoleo]

Ps: oh yes and before '93 I've had so much fun practical joking around :)

[wolvoleo]

Xauth fixed that way back in '93. All you have to do is use -Y not -X with SSH.

[throwawaymobule]

Waypipe looks interesting.

The main advantage of x forwarding for me was when I'd randomly need it and had nothing set up ahead of time. Hopefully it starts getting installed in distros by default eventually.