Somewhat misleading. Because these days, none of the network transparent primitives are used anymore. All the rendering happens server side, and bitmaps are sent over the wire. It's basically a crappy VNC. And at that point, just use RDP or VNC
That greatly depends on the type of applications you run and the toolkits and font rendering they use. My most commonly used applications (terminal emulator, Emacs) do their font rendering using the the glyph compositing functionality of the RENDER extension. Server side glyphs are created when a font is loaded and all the compositing is done on the server side based on the client's CompositeGlyphs requests. Same for images (in Emacs) using CreatePixmap and CopyArea.
Indeed. There are also plenty of terminals that uses the old server-side font rendering calls. For terminals, using client-side buffers is the exception - mostly the handful that use OpenGL.
That's really not true. Qt as of Qt 6 still supports using native X11 drawing commands and that covers a lot of apps. Tkinter too (and this covers many technical apps which are exactly the ones likely to be used over the wire).
Just last week I was debugging remotely an art installation which uses my software, https://ossia.io and was running on a Pi 5, I compared X11 and VNC and X11 was really much more useable even over the internet.
XPRA using h264 or h265 does a decent job in my experience in term of performance to increase over ssh -X.
On wayland from I am also getting good results with waypipe opening individual apps from VMs to make it a poor man's QubeOS without the complexity and without having to open the whole remote desktop.
> All the rendering happens server side, and bitmaps are sent over the wire. It's basically a crappy VNC.
Even if this were true (which it isn't), there's a lot more to a GUI than the G. A lot of nice interoperability is provided too, like clipboard integration, dragging and dropping, mixed windows on the same taskbar, etc. Far more pleasant to use than awkwardly going to a full screen thing to get a window out.
Yeah, I have nothing constructive to say about apps and toolkits that choose only local rendering with no hardware, but it's pretty funny to see Javascript apps beating them on performance.
