- Performance is not the only consideration - local-only would remove a lot of design & implementation complexity. (similar to local pipe vs network socket etc)

- As a dev/admin, I depend on SSH but not on X.

- The "dangers of cloud" argument is not exactly helping the pitch for network transparency. :)

"Performance is not the only consideration - local-only would remove a lot of design & implementation complexity. (similar to local pipe vs network socket etc)"

Being network-transparent does not mean being complicated. See the Plan9 window systems:

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/812/

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/3rd_edition/rio/

Huh? Please. No one is asking you to give up SSH. Honestly I never use remote X. It's just too clunky and dependent on a perhaps-flaky network (oops, lost the network connection for a minute? crap, there goes the entire app). I just use command-line stuff over ssh for all my remote admin, inside a screen session if necessary. Never had a problem with this.

"Honestly I never use remote X. It's just too clunky"

Why not try to fix it? This isn't the fault of network transparency or even the X11 protocol, but the tools.

"oops, lost the network connection for a minute? crap, there goes the entire app"

How is that different from losing your SSH connection? There's a screen-like program for X that gives you persistent applications: http://code.google.com/p/partiwm/wiki/xpra