Who is Using X11's LBX and RX Features?

tjansen asks: "In 1998 Open Group released X11R6.4, which introduced two nifty features called LBX (Low Bandwidth X) and RX (Remote Execution). LBX reduced the bandwidth needed by the X protocol, and RX made it possible to embed a remote X11 application securely into a Netscape plugin. Since version 4.0 both are also included in XFree86. Together they look like a nice and platform-independent solution for Application Service Providers (there are Windows clients, of course) and I wonder why I have never seen anybody using this."

Comments

Why Not LBX?

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The number of users of X is a small proportion of the internet as a whole.

Those that do use X fall into 2 categories

1. Bandwidth rich LANs
2. Home users with a Linux box over PPP to an ISP

In the first case, there's little need to worry about introducing any more complexity to support remote X applications. Despite all the hoopla over a network based windowing system, the only time I take advantage of it is to run remote X terminal sessions (rxvt) to my display. Am I BW limited? No way.

Meanwhile, in the second case, I am BW limited, but using LBX does not address my problems running a Linux box at home. I run a browswer and all X clients locally and display locally. Maybe once I ran exmh on the ISP's machine just to see what it was like having direct disk access to my mail, but it generally didn't seem worth the hassle. Any graphics attachments still had to be rendered over a slow pipe.

If they had put LBX into the low level infrastructure from the beginning, so that all X protocol would use it transparently, then it would have been great. Otherwise, IMHO, it's just a great idea still looking for problem to solve.