this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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One thing to note with X11's design, having a server and client, there was nothing requiring both to be on the same machine. You could run an X11 client on your local machine, ssh into a remote machine and use its X11 server.
Lets say you are home and can ssh into a work server. You could run Firefox on the work machine, using it's network and have the visual parts show up on your home computer.
This was very much a Unix, shared resource style design. Servers and thin clients. Put all your horse power in the big machine and connect using your crappy low power system to it.
Keep in mind that in practice this didn't work that well, it wasn't very efficient at displaying modern interfaces over the network. Showing a simple text editor over LAN worked fine, but using Firefox from another place was quite spotty.
Oddly I think the only cases I ever used it where I was connecting to my home computer from outside my house was when I needed to connect to my router's webpage. SSH to my home computer and then pull up the browser to open a port on my DMZ or other such nonsense.
When at home and just using LAN bandwidth it was to run lesser programs.
Back than I tried this. The performance was horrible, even on a good connection. It was barely tolerable on LAN, but over the Internet ... no. Just no. There were and are better solution for accessing a remote machine.
It was fine when rendering (esp. text) was server side and not client side like it is now. At least LAN (10MB ethernet) was basically transparent. Internet was shit mainly because everyone was on 56k modems.
GTK and Qt do all their rendering client side and transfer bitmaps to the server requiring much more bandwidth.
I realize not using this model was intentional with Wayland, but I wish it had something similar.
I've never tried it, but there's Waypipe.
That looks like a great solution, will have to try it out.