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  • [gentoo-user] Re: How to run X11 apps remotely?

    From Grant Edwards@21:1/5 to Laurence Perkins on Tue Mar 22 19:20:02 2022
    On 2022-03-22, Laurence Perkins <[email protected]> wrote:

    Even something "lightweight" like atril is so slow it's barely usable.

    I do not want a "remote desktop". I just want to run a single
    application on a remote machine and have its window show up locally.

    Back in the day, I used to run X11 apps remotely through dial-up >>connections, and most of them were a little sluggish but still
    actually usable...

    X11 transparent network support was its killer feature, but for all >>practical purpopses, that feature seems to have been killed.

    As you mentioned, it's a lot of extra round-trips. Which means that
    it's not primarily your bandwidth that's the limiting factor, it's
    the latency.

    Unfortunately, the speed of light being what it is, there are
    practical limits to what you can do about latency depending on how
    far apart the systems in question are.

    Where "far" is measured more in in hops than miles. :)

    Even with cut-through routing, each hop can be expensive. Add a couple firewalls with stateful packet inpsection, and latency from my house
    to the house next door isn't great.

    But, check for and mitigate any bufferbloat issues you may have,
    that will spike your latency quite a bit.

    The key back in the day was that people used X11 primitives
    directly. But the X11 primitives are ugly, and there weren't any
    tools for making them pretty.

    Yea, I remember. I wrote a couple xlib apps way back back when and it
    was painful. Even the old Xt toolkit wasn't fun. I do appreciate how
    easy it is to slap together something in Python and Gtk, I just wish
    it worked remotely after it was done. :)

    So rather than add those mechanisms all the toolkit authors just did
    their own thing and now everything is just bitmaps and practically
    no processing can be done locally.

    Some programs like gVim will detect that they're running over SSH
    and fall back to basic X11 for the speed factor. Not sure what
    browsers might do that.

    Things like Xemacs are still usable, but if I'm doing emacs, I usually
    just run it directly in an ssh "terminal".

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  • From Grant Edwards@21:1/5 to Grant Edwards on Tue Mar 22 19:20:02 2022
    On 2022-03-22, Grant Edwards <[email protected]> wrote:

    How does one run "modern" X11 apps remotely?
    [...]
    I do not want a "remote desktop". I just want to run a single
    application on a remote machine and have its window show up locally.

    It looks like xpra will do what I want: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/x11-wm/xpra
    It's interesting that it's classified as a window manager.

    From https://xpra.org/:

    It gives you remote access to individual applications or full
    desktops.

    Xpra is usable over reasonably slow links and does its best to
    adapt to changing network bandwidth constraints.

    haven't tried it yet...

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  • From James Cloos@21:1/5 to All on Tue Mar 22 22:00:01 2022
    ah, yes. i completely forgot about xpra.

    probabably a better solution than spice.

    -JimC
    --
    James Cloos <[email protected]> OpenPGP: 0x997A9F17ED7DAEA6

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  • From Grant Edwards@21:1/5 to Grant Taylor on Tue Mar 22 22:00:01 2022
    On 2022-03-22, Grant Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 3/22/22 10:41 AM, Grant Edwards wrote:
    How does one run "modern" X11 apps remotely?

    Xvnc

    As in run an Xvnc server as an X11 server / display. Point your
    programs at that display / server. Then have a VNC client connect to
    said VNC server.

    I've used VNC in the past, and always ended up with a virtual
    desktop/screen rather than having a remote application show up in a
    window.

    I do not want a "remote desktop". I just want to run a single
    application on a remote machine and have its window show up locally.

    You can adjust the size of the Xvnc's display so that it's the size of
    just the application in question. You also don't need the full desktop
    to display on that screen.

    OK, I've done that, but it's a little awkward to have to constantly
    adjust the Xvnc display to match the application window size. It
    appears that Xpra can handle that automatically.

    X11 transparent network support was its killer feature,
    I completely agree. Especially when you start running different
    programs on different systems / users / contexts.

    but for all practical purpopses, that feature seems to have been
    killed.

    I don't think that's true.

    Of course it depends on which X11 apps you need to run remotely. For
    everything I've needed to run remotely in the past decade or so, it
    was unusable.

    The path to my remote host is also rather ugly. It jumps most of the
    way across the county and back through at least two NAT
    firewalls. Though the ping time is actually pretty decent (15-20ms)
    for the path it has to take.

    --
    Grant

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