On 05/05/2016 06:06 AM, WF Konynenberg wrote:
>> In the world of "UNIX graybeards" it has always been conventional
>> wisdom that servers don't run a GUI. A lot of people do it, but that
>> doesn't make it the right thing to do, for exactly the reasons you cite
>> above, and more. (security, for example)
>>
>> Note well that, as several people have pointed out in this thread, not
>> running a GUI on a server does not preclude the use of GUI-based
>> installers, if one is actually required (as you mention above) in the
>> first place. For decades the UNIX world has enjoyed the benefits of
>> network-based windowing systems...No "remote desktop", no "copying"
>> screen contents across the network, or other such foolishness...but
>> native "open this window OVER THERE" behaviors that do not require
>> graphics hardware (and its attendant hundreds of thousands of lines of
>> code) on the system on which the GUIfied program is executed.
>
> Do note that although the entire underlying concept of the X11 windowing
> system has always been that it is fully network based, and thus it
> doesn't matter where the applications are running, modern Desktop
> Environments mostly destroy this notion with an implicit and deeply
> ingrained "one man, one computer" assumption.
Yup. That's pretty much what I said. ;)
> In the original implementations of X11, *all* programs were remote from
> the perspective of the X11 display server, which ran on a specialized X
> Terminal device that did nothing but run the display server. It
> contacted some remote server to present the initial display, which was
> either a login screen or a host chooser.
Those were later implementations, yes. The original implementations
were a bit different. The first experimental implementation was on a
VAXstation-100, which was a fiber-connected remote bitmap graphics
terminal that connected to a Unibus controller board, typically
installed in a VAX. The next few implementations were on computers that
had bitmapped graphics hardware, one of the first being a MicroVAX-I
with a VCB01 bitmapped graphics board installed.
But I'm picking nits. I cannot help myself. ;) I'm a DEChead (and a
lot of early X work was done by DEC), a computer history nut (I run a
public vintage computer museum), and someone who has used X daily for a
few decades.
> These good old times are long gone, and a typical X11 setup these days
> behaves a lot more like a typical Windows PC, in that all the funky
> "Desktop Environment" software implicitly assumes that there is a single
> user running on their own personal computer with lots of spare CPU &
> RAM, where all their applications are running. Wasting hundreds of
> megabytes of RAM and several percent of your 3GHz of CPU cycles for a
> simple cute looking clock in the corner is not considered an issue at all.
Yes, it's gross. But those good old times being long gone is just an
issue of usage. I regularly run stuff on other systems displayed back
to my desktop machine. It's all still there, and it all works great,
with the exception of some stuff (like PCB layout software) that
requires GL.
> However, the underlying network mechanisms are all still there, so it's
> not too hard to set things up such that any given application gets
> started on any given remote server, as desired.
Yup, it all Just Works(tm). Many people...not you, you obviously know
this stuff very well...but most other people, including the original
poster on this thread, could derive great utility from spending a few
minutes learning about how this stuff works. The underlying design
principles are solid gold and it all works extremely well. Using
something like a Windows machine, or even a Mac these days, feels like
stepping back into the dark ages for people who know the raw power of
real graphical systems.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
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