One thing that seems to be missing from this discussion is 'networking'. One fundamental difference between the way Windows works and the way X work is that they are "the other way round" from each other. That makes X an intrinsic remote protocol and hence network-able to start with. They Greybeards among us may recall, a century or more ago, attending USENIX and InterOp conferences where the "terminal room" had X terminals that allowed the miscreants to access their home accounts (often at universities, for such was the nature of the (small 'i') internet in those days). MS-Windows was not a networking protocol. MS-DOS was not about networking the terminal. Aficionados from those days might recall that in order to get acceptable performance, many applications wrote directly to the graphics memory rather than use the INT10 call. And so it went when when Windows came along. the display is the client, the applications are the server, just the other way round from X. It was not intrinsically there to deal with networking and remote access because it grew out the PC world rather than the shared server world of UNIX. The PC was the complete ecosystem, all closely coupled. This was before networking, before the internet. Did Bill Gates actually say "The internet is just a passing fad" or "The Internet? We are not interested in it"? But remember, MS-DOS and even W/95 was before the "commercial" side of the (big "I") Internet took of. ANS had just started "CO+RE" in 1991 and sold its networking side to AOL in 1995 when the NFS backbone was decommissioned. We might view that as the starting point; it wasn't rally until the rise of the WorldWideWeb (the concept rather than Berners-Lee program of the same name running on the NEXT) that the Internet really took off. Adding network access to MS-Windows display was VERY different from the way X works. X, like NAPLPS, like HTTP says things like "set font; set size; set location; display text"; "set colour, set location, draw this shape, this size". MS-Windows has to transmit the image. Its not that X (and the others) don't have a means to BitBlit a framebuffer, its just that its not their primary mode. They try to be network efficient, and X and NAPLPS were workable over a 1200 baud link. I'm sure sending raw http over a 1200 baud link would be liveable, I've never tried it :-) I *have* used X and NAPLPS over a 1200 baud link and they were quite liveable. (Yes, I preferred a 2400 or even 9600 baud modem, but that's beside the point.) Trying to run the Windows remote protocols over a 10Mhz ethernet is frustrating enough. Trying to run something like VNC is hair-pulling. We have an Windows application at work that runs with dual screens doing document comparison - the scanned source document on one screen and the database entry of the same on the other. Compare and correct or input. The manager asked IT to permit it to to be used 'at home". IT equipped the user with more than adequate computing power and a high speed cable link. It sucked. Well I do transcontinental, even transatlantic work with many windows open and more than acceptable updates using X on Linux, so why was this performing badly? The IT guys paid to jack up the data rates; it got better but not good enough. Transmitting the frame buffers for a pair of large screen page mode displays (each 5120 × 2880 @16:9) was crazed! I took in a drive with Suse on it, configured that home machine to used X, set up my Linux machine at work to do a similar access (I don't have actual access to the documents and database but set up similar for the demo.) The excellent performance sent the manager ballistic and nearly got me fired. Why? I'd embarrassed him and his decision to use the Windows application. IT wasn't too happy either. The end resolution was that the work at home initiative was cancelled. Could it have turned out differently? Could there have been some other solution? Citrix-based maybe? Possibly. But this isn't the only time I've seen an expensive and difficult Windows & network based project that could have been done cheaper-faster-easier with Linux. So much of Windows and Windows attitude involves shoving vast amounts of stuff over the network. Of course this is good for people selling things like Cisco Gigabit networking stuff, switches and fibre, and large flash memory arrays. Personally I'm more parsimonious. Its easy to forget when we're using a PC that with Linux the display is actually networked (even if it only via UNIX sockets) and not closely coupled like MS-Windows. If someone wants to implement a closely couple display mechanism for Linux that still have to deal with the applications (aka clients) that use the X protocol and so there needs to be an X11-shim. Oh, right, yes, Leyland has one. Because Wayland is not, as X11 is, network transparent. https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8 I can't "call home" or do the kind of remote access I can with X11 using just Wayland. I still need that X11 capability even if my machine is using Wayland to do the local display. Perhaps if you want Wayland you should be using Archlinux rather then openSuse. Suse is a lot more conservative :-) -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org