Windows 10
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
What is a native networked interface?
The UNIX desktop interface is networked, always, even when local. UNIX does not have the concept of a local console like Windows does. Windows has a local console and then you use protocols like RDP or RFB (VNC) to connect to that console or a copy of that console. This is based on the DOS legacy and the assumption that computers have a local monitor and a person sitting physically at them.
The UNIX world does not have this assumption. If you have a local console, it is actually connected over a network. The network might be local, but there is a network connection. Using a UNIX machine locally or remotely is transparent, you are always a network connection no matter where you are. The X protocol handles this. This loose coupling of the desktop and the hardware helps to give UNIX the native multi-user feel that Windows lacks.
The entire concept of VDI is a Windows thing because it doesn't need to exist on Linux. Linux natively handles multiple users in a way that Windows does not. Windows is using virtualization to make containers to mimic what UNIX and Linux were doing in the 1970s.
Aww yes, I knew this, just not it's name.
I have to ask - what do you sacrifice doing it this way? Performance? anything?
Considering what a Windows desktop machine is a desktop - it was always intended to be used by a single person with an attached keyboard, mouse and monitor - I'm not surprised it works this way.
But Unix, and later linux (based on unix, right?) Those guys grew up in the datacenter, away from the users, the need for multiuser remote access was there from the start. It naturally makes sense they would do that for their xServer (is this the right name?) environment too.
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@Dashrender said:
There are still features that Novell Netware had that MS has not implemented (I can't remember what, I only barely scratch the surface of Netware, and will admit, it's possible by now that MS has actually caught up to feature parity). But Novell lost marketshare and funding therefore died - plus I'm guessing their pricing structure had something to do with it.
Novell was really hard to use. And it was really expensive. It still exists though. Novell is still around and eDirectory was sold to NetIQ:
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@IRJ said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
What is a native networked interface?
The UNIX desktop interface is networked, always, even when local. UNIX does not have the concept of a local console like Windows does. Windows has a local console and then you use protocols like RDP or RFB (VNC) to connect to that console or a copy of that console. This is based on the DOS legacy and the assumption that computers have a local monitor and a person sitting physically at them.
The UNIX world does not have this assumption. If you have a local console, it is actually connected over a network. The network might be local, but there is a network connection. Using a UNIX machine locally or remotely is transparent, you are always a network connection no matter where you are. The X protocol handles this. This loose coupling of the desktop and the hardware helps to give UNIX the native multi-user feel that Windows lacks.
The entire concept of VDI is a Windows thing because it doesn't need to exist on Linux. Linux natively handles multiple users in a way that Windows does not. Windows is using virtualization to make containers to mimic what UNIX and Linux were doing in the 1970s.
ah ok. SO that is kind of what Microsoft is trying to do with Server Manager?
No, very different. UNIX takes the entire desktop, the normal desktop that users would use, and always has it on the network.
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Odd Scott's messages appear after mine, but he click Submit before i did.
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@Dashrender said:
Considering what a Windows desktop machine is a desktop - it was always intended to be used by a single person with an attached keyboard, mouse and monitor - I'm not surprised it works this way.
Yes, the history makes sense. When they went to NT from DOS, though, they decided to keep the single user context as the core of what they were doing rather than taking the more modern, forward looking UNIX model. The Windows model remained closer to DOS, Commodore 64, Mac OS 1, Atari, etc. from the 8bit era rather than UNIX from the networked era.
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Do you think there was a reason for this?
Perhaps the Windows dev team at the time never considered windows to be used like nix was? The user interacting directly with the server machine like a remote session.
Or was it for performance or some other reason?
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@Dashrender said:
I have to ask - what do you sacrifice doing it this way? Performance? anything?
Sure, single user performance has to suffer some. But pretty little. And on modern systems you basically cannot measure it. Using Linux locally feels just like Windows.
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@Dashrender said:
Do you think there was a reason for this?
Perhaps the Windows dev team at the time never considered windows to be used like nix was? The user interacting directly with the server machine like a remote session.
Or was it for performance or some other reason?
I could only guess. Probably it was quicker and cheaper to develop and required less effort.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I have to ask - what do you sacrifice doing it this way? Performance? anything?
Sure, single user performance has to suffer some. But pretty little. And on modern systems you basically cannot measure it. Using Linux locally feels just like Windows.
Is the X protocol tantamount to RDP? i.e. does all the real processing still happen on the linux box?
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From the server side, I can see it being extremely beneficial to pull the GUI off the machine and present it a la linux/Unix
While it's not the same, MS has sorta recognized this by creating Windows Server Core.
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@Dashrender said:
But Unix, and later linux (based on unix, right?) Those guys grew up in the datacenter, away from the users, the need for multiuser remote access was there from the start. It naturally makes sense they would do that for their xServer (is this the right name?) environment too.
Yes, Linux is a UNIX. UNIX is the family, Linux is a specific kernel within the UNIX family, CentOS or Ubuntu are specific implementations of an OS built from the Linux kernel.
X Window System is the name of the standard UNIX desktop (used by Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, etc.) system. The X client is what runs on the "server" side and the X server runs on the "desktop" side. The naming is ridiculously confusing for no good reason as far as I know. So on a normal Linux desktop you would see both the client and the server running on the same box. If you connect remotely, the X client runs on the headless machine and the X server is the one that actually shows the graphics.
(This of the X client as Apache and the X server as Chrome.)
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@Dashrender said:
Is the X protocol tantamount to RDP? i.e. does all the real processing still happen on the linux box?
Yes and no. X is more "raw." If you were really going to access Linux remotely you will normally use VNC, RDP, NX, etc. to encapsulate X to make it more robust for network usage (RDP is leaner and more compressed.) X is pretty raw so that you can do with it what you want. Commonly people would just encapsulate in SSH to make it easy to access over a WAN.
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I was going to ask why you would want to run X over a network/WAN, but the answer is for the same reason you might want to run a Terminal Server/App Server, etc.
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@Dashrender said:
While it's not the same, MS has sorta recognized this by creating Windows Server Core.
Core addresses something different. In the UNIX world, you have always had the ability to remove the desktop completely. In fact for the first decade or more, there was no desktop at all (there were no monitors back then!) Windows Server Core allows Windows to be stripped of its desktop to make it a pure server as every OS except for Windows has always worked.
Microsoft is not doing anything that takes it towards the native networked interface model. That's just not something they are looking to do.
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@Dashrender said:
From the server side, I can see it being extremely beneficial to pull the GUI off the machine and present it a la linux/Unix
For a server you would still never want a GUI. This is really about desktop / terminal server usage, not normal server usage.
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@Dashrender said:
I was going to ask why you would want to run X over a network/WAN, but the answer is for the same reason you might want to run a Terminal Server/App Server, etc.
Correct. And using X has always given the ability to share a full desktop or to send only a single application / window over the network. It is pretty slick. What works great is that local windows and remote windows are completely the same, you can't tell where things are coming from. So a user can have a local desktop and have some apps running on a remote server somewhere, perfect for an application that needs heft computation or needs to run from a secured location or you need to balance network load. It's very nice. You can do the same thing with XenApp but it isn't cheap or simple. Every UNIX desktop can do this.
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@Dashrender said:
Perhaps the Windows dev team at the time never considered windows to be used like nix was? The user interacting directly with the server machine like a remote session.
The Terminal Server product is quite old. They were definitely thinking in this direction a very long time ago, but maybe not as early as when they started down the OS/2 path with IBM which created the foundation of NT.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Perhaps the Windows dev team at the time never considered windows to be used like nix was? The user interacting directly with the server machine like a remote session.
The Terminal Server product is quite old. They were definitely thinking in this direction a very long time ago, but maybe not as early as when they started down the OS/2 path with IBM which created the foundation of NT.
True, they were thinking about it a long time ago.. but instead of solving it like Unix did, they bought technology from Citrix and applied it - that seems like a mistake in hindsight.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
From the server side, I can see it being extremely beneficial to pull the GUI off the machine and present it a la linux/Unix
For a server you would still never want a GUI. This is really about desktop / terminal server usage, not normal server usage.
I'm trying to think why you would want this for general desktops? In an office environment, ok - maybe for support reasons, but for standard home users? would this really be that useful?
