Patrick O'Callaghan writes:
On Sun, 2025-04-20 at 17:45 -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote: > > One of the big problems with containers (including Flatpaks) is that > > they don't integrate well with the desktop environment. Then the app > > relies on the DE to (say) print things, there's usually some jumping > > through hoops to be done. >> I routinely run apps on my server that have no issues, whatsoever, with the> desktop I'm running on my laptop (the one that's logged in to the server). > > That's not at all what I meant. A DE includes a layer of inter-app communication between its components which doesn't work well when the apps are sandboxed from each other. A typical example: a Flatpak-based Email MUA doesn't know what other apps you have installed, so when you click on something in a message it can only offer you a picker to decide which app has to process it rather than using your system default.
I know what you meant. What I was saying is that X also provides all the necessary glue itself. Now, it may very well be that most kinds of inter-app communications ended up getting built on top of other scaffolding. But not all of them did, and it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
You might be surprised to learn that you've been one version of it forever. It's called "cut-n-paste". Content cut or copied in one app gets pasted into another app. The apps don't really know anything about each other, directly, all of that is handled through X. This is all handled via inter-app communication through X.
Running apps on a server and communicating with a client desktop is a different situation.
Not really, it's all part of the same, basic, scaffolding. You can run an app on the server, cut some content of it, and paste it into a different app running on the client. X arranges the breadcrumbs by which the clients' windows find each other and grok the same language.
I rooted through all of the gory details, icccm, ewmh, and X11 primitives, some time ago. It's all there. The fly in the ointment is that the nuts and the bolts of it are difficult use, cumbersome, and lack some convenient features. This should've been addressed – and could've been addressed – a long time ago. And because it wasn't (or, at least, that's one of the reasons), the whole thing is being dumped into a trash bin. Sad.
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