Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 24, 2012 21:51 UTC (Fri) by jdobbs1010 (guest, #83118)
In reply to: Wayland - Beyond X (The H) by bloopletech
Parent article: Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

I use X applications over a network every day, as part of my work as a software developer in a largish company. Typically running Eclipse on server-class linux hardware, with a Cygwin X server on a Windows (XP of course - the corporate standard!) desktop. Eclipse on Linux, because I'm developing C++ server applications for Linux. Also DDD, occasionally SunStudio on Solaris (because there's still a few Solaris-only servers to maintain). The company only officially support vnc for this type of thing, but I didn't like it much last time I tried it (a few years back, I admit), and X has solved the 'application running on a different machine to the display' requirement ever since I can remember using X (ie since around about 1993).

Looking around the corporate environment (i.e. the cube farm where I sit), there are no people using a Linux desktop at work (its not the corporate standard, yet!). There are dozens of developers using X network transparency to do similar work to me. OK, maybe software developers are different, but you will also find in corporate environments, long-ago developed X applications that are deployed to users using X servers such as Exceed (another corporate standard). Maybe not as many as in the past, but these applications are not going away (there's a 3270 terminal emulator one every corporate desktop, too).

Another corporate standard in widespread, and on-going use, here is Citrix XenApp. Quoting Wikipedia...

"Unlike framebuffered protocols like VNC, ICA transmits high-level window display information, much like the X11 protocol, as opposed to purely graphical information."

Its the Windows implementation of X network transparency - companies love it, and employees use it a lot. This is a requirement with a large user population, not a small one.

To say no one uses X network transparency reflects your computing environment, but not mine.

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Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 24, 2012 23:36 UTC (Fri) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]

> "Unlike framebuffered protocols like VNC, ICA transmits high-level
> window display information, much like the X11 protocol, as opposed to
> purely graphical information."
>
> Its the Windows implementation of X network transparency - companies
> loveit, and employees use it a lot. This is a requirement with a large
> user population, not a small one.

I worked with Citrix a lot in the past and despite some real issues on the administration side, ICA as a protocol and Citrix in its implementation of it works extremely well. But you know what? As pointed out previously in this discussion it was a retrofit on top of a non-networked windowing system; so it kind of suggests that people who are saying it's not possible to have such network transparency without designing it in from the beginning might just be completely wrong.