Every newcomers to X think that servers and clients are reversed because they are

Paul Dufresne dufresnep at gmail.com
Tue Apr 19 20:36:17 PDT 2011


Hi!
For years I have heard of how we must rethink what is the server and
what are the clients when coming to X.

But the more I think about it, the more I conclude X is wrong, and
should reverse their order.

What you call the X server should be an X client.
You could think as the applications being the server... but I guess
this is not really correct either.

An X server should wait for clients to connect (yes, that point X does
the right thing).
But what is now the client, should have a list of X server (that does
not exist yet) to connect to.
When you connect to an X server, you should be given a list of
applications allowable to connect to. Then, you would be able to open
one of the applications available, at your choice.

>From there, a new connection would be open between the application and
the client (what is now called the X server), pretty much like a new
connection is created right now.

This would make X system much more useful I believe, because it would
fit the way people expect server and clients to work. Then making a
multi-user game would be pretty obvious, because it would just means
to add some new avatar each time a new X client would connect to the
game application on a given X server.

At least, that the way I think it should be.



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