I've got one on my desk which ssh -X's into a "real" computer and then throws a java script heavy dashboard up on the Rpi's X11 screen. Sort of like an X-terminal of yore. Running the browser native on the Rpi bogs down.
I've also got one serving up a static view of some database with json and thttpd. I've found that NFS mounting storage is more effective than using the SD card (in another thread where we were debating the longevity of SD Cards I took one and wrote a bunch of files to it until it failed, which it did fairly quickly, so I try to keep all file systems mostly readonly on the SDcard and R/W mounted ones. You could also use a USB drive for that. The Rpi's Achilles heel is that everything goes through USB though.
I know it kind of misses the point (and risks never solving the problem by sidestepping it) but is there an X server for it?
If there is, it readily becomes a usable work environment.
A couple months back I was wondering if there was a good way to tie an RPi to an Apple II and use its keyboard and memory (to display a Linux console) and allow me to have the pleasure of actually working from a vintage computer.
Hmm, I guess I would use a terminal then. I do C++ programming a lot on linux clusters for science. Being able to launch X11 compiled applications remotely would be great. I currently do this using netbeans on windows.
I use it for x forwarding through ssh. That lets me use graphical linux programs without needing to run a whole desktop environment inside my linux vm.
Yes, I use that all the time too. There are certainly alternatives around for getting a remote window displayed locally but the simplicity of "ssh -X" is hard to beat.
On an instrustial machine I worked on we got around this by hosting a node.js website on a Linux touch screen panel. There was a redis cache which was updated by a small python script that communicated with the embedded stuff via a serial interface.
If you have the budget for it, this is a great architecture since creating a website GUI is much easier than an embedded GUI. Also, you could very easily pull up the machine control panel remotely from any web browser (with proper remote vs local security enabled of course).
I use xpra (to the extent that it works for me, anyway). But there are situations when I don't want to attach an X app - I just want to connect to a screen in an existing terminal. Raw text over ssh is the fastest and most responsive over a laggy connection, too.
IO devices were also mounted/manipulable within this filesystem. So you could mount your home keyboard/mouse/monitor to your remote workstation (maybe an HPC box in some datacenter) and continue working where you left off. Java tried something similar with Jini but without the powerful abstract of everything being a file descriptor in some hierarchical mapping.
I used to have my RS-6000 (connected to my Intergraph monitor and a proper Model-M keyboard) running as X client to my laptop, which had a much smaller screen, and work that way. I could run a browser on the laptop (Firefox doesn't like X too much) and have a couple terminals and Emacs on glorious AIX flavored CDE.
You can run each program in full screen on a separate instance of Xephyr or Xnest, so the program will have a whole separate X server to play with in isolation. Good for running Raspberry Pi desktop via `ssh -X` or `ssh -Y`.
There are X servers for most major operating systems, including, AFAIU Android. For OSX it's XQuartz (either native or XTools), for Windows, MingX11 and I suspect WSL, as well as various proprietary tools.
I'm not arguing that X11 is more streamlined than remote SSH (or tmux!) in a terminal / console. But it is far more available than you might think.
X over SSH works really well for me as long as I enable SSH compression. At least for my usage, I can't tell it apart from a native window but then again I'm not running sophisticated programs which update frequently.
If you want remote access, NX is much better than pure X (nomachine has some great tools), and is on par (if not better) than RDP (in my opinion, anyway). I prefer straight SSH, but this is obviously not the same use case as yours.
Not really what you are asking for, but I've been working on a low powered Windows machine with just Putty-ing (SSH-ing) to my Linux desktop for quite some time now.
I pipe what Xorg stuff I need through SSH and otherwise I just work in tmux + vim.
So far only pain point has been downloading stuff via browser on Windows since I don't have sshfs or any other real-time file transfer setup between the machines, but that happens rarely enough that I've just put up with psftp
I use mobaxterm on windows which has an X terminal builtin (IIRC). I've never actually had to use it - I just the the ssh/rdp/scp stuff. But its free to try it...
I've also got one serving up a static view of some database with json and thttpd. I've found that NFS mounting storage is more effective than using the SD card (in another thread where we were debating the longevity of SD Cards I took one and wrote a bunch of files to it until it failed, which it did fairly quickly, so I try to keep all file systems mostly readonly on the SDcard and R/W mounted ones. You could also use a USB drive for that. The Rpi's Achilles heel is that everything goes through USB though.
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