Comment by throwaw111 4 days ago
I mean, no one does what you suggest on the web. You do not render a web page to an image and send that to a browser. To summarize. No one wants X11 transparency to run a web browser. But ok, if someone wants to do that.. X11 still can be more advantegeous over waypipe.
Idk given there is no concept of cache. But also I'm looking at GTK menu, it is a simple menu, white bg. May be it can be rendered using draw calls. May be the complex UIs is just fashion and will be gone in a few years. The GUIlib could detect if program is running on a remote computer and reduce the effects, but they will need a concept of network for that.
Also the font rendering. The client could then just send text to the x11 server if it was not vector fonts.
x11 xrdb. With it you can configure say font size on your computer, not on the computer where program is running. Say comp1: 10pt, comp2: 20pt.
It's not "complex UI", it's what programs are generally used. It's gtk, qt, and a bunch of other cross-platform platforms all doing their own thing. They simply render (in a hardware-accelerated way) to a local buffer and that's the only commonality.
Could random draw calls be transported over the network? Sure, and for certain kinds of GUIs it is definitely more efficient than rendering and sending some compressed artifact.
Will XMotif suddenly change the world and apps will be written in it? Absolutely not. It's not even a thing on the minuscule Linux desktop, let alone elsewhere. We are running electron apps and whatnot.
And as I said, this "send draw commands" exists: SVGs are possibly the closest thing, but the web as a whole is literally this with a couple of more features.
Because on the web we have a very very complex protocol(s) built up over decades to tell a client what to draw locally. That's html/css/js and its scope is far larger than of x draw commands (it's also an application model).
But again, GUI apps don't use X draw commands for the most part, so they are effectively a bitmap/video stream to X's eyes. And what's better to transport a video stream than a format designed for efficient transport of video streams.