alt Hacker News"reasonably well" as in... yeah it works. But it's extremely laggy (for comparison, I know people who forwarded DirectX calls over 10Mbit ethernet and could get ~15 frames/sec playing Unreal Tournament in the early 00's), and any network blip is liable to cause a window that you can neither interact with nor forcefully close.
It felt like a prototype feature that never became production-ready for that reason alone. Then there's all the security concerns that solidify that.
But yes, it does work reasonably well, and it is actually really cool. I just wish it were... better.
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For applications that were written with X11 in mind it works much much better than that. One example was the controlling a telescope. The computers in the control room were thin clients pretty much and displayed various windows from various machines across the mountain - even across multiple different operating systems! Some machines were running Solaris and some linux. The different machines belonged to different aspects of the telescope: some controlled the telescope itself and some machines belonged to the different scientifc instruments on the telescope. And it all worked quite well with no real noticeable lag.
It is laggy but not because of protocol limitations but due to Xlib not being able to hide the latency and we never got the proper support from toolkits to do this via XCB. Xpra or other proxys work around this, but it would be nice if toolkits supported this directly. Also reconnect or moving windows between displays would be no problem if toolkits supported this.