Hi Petr! Petr Cerny wrote
Doesn't sound convincing. What is the most current definitive guide for not using X11 forwarding? What should I tell a newby when he/she asks *WHY* it should not be used? (...)
(...) 2) speed - the X protocol is usually much more verbose when compared to VNC, since it carries requests to draw things, while VNC only transports bitmaps (compressed). Try running Firefox via ssh -X and through VNC. I've also seen things that just didn't work via SSH-forwarded X11. (...)
I've been following this discussion with a lot of interest, and I've been learning a lot from it. BTW, just out of curiosity: are you really saying that it is more "compact" to send bitmaps through the network rather than sending plain text commands? Because I have always thought to the contrary, and that that was one of the great advantages of X forwarding. Actually, I've always been experiencing bad results (talking about visual quality here) with VNC unless on very fast and not-congested networks, while X forwarding is just like running a local application. I know that bitmaps can be compressed, but bitmaps are not very compressible unless you want to lose on the quality of the image (i.e. lossy compression). And as the network speed/congestion gets bad, so is the quality of the image to the point where, sometimes, you cannot even clearly read text. On the other hand, even a very verbose *text* protocol can be very easily compressed down to nearly nothing, and you always get perfect graphics because they are rendered locally. Also, there should be no overhead on the server, because the X11 protocol works the same way when used locally or remotely. That's exactly why it can be forwarded. At least that's what I learned back when I was in school, I don't know what's the situation right now with compositors and all that stuff. That said, I use X forwarding only when I have to use the occasional GUI application window; when I have to grab a whole remote desktop I usually use current NoMachine's NX, which is a lot more reliable than VNC in my experience (despite not being open source). But that is usually because I have to grab the desktop of another user, not because of efficiency considerations (with respect to X11 forwarding, I mean). I've been trying to use xrdp *server* too, but I find it too much unstable in my experience. OTOH I use xfreerdp client all the time when I have to connect to Windows server (due to my work) and I find it quite fast and stable. Just my 2c. Cris -- Sent from: http://opensuse.14.x6.nabble.com/opensuse-factory-f3292933.html -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org