[WalterGR]

Sorry if I'm being obtuse, but... why would X11 toolkits need to ship client-rendered images across the network?

Doesn't the server tell the client what to render, and the rendering happens on the client? Why would that result then be shipped over the network?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

[andrewshadura]

Also, in X terminology, the server owns/controls the display, the client is the app that wants to draw a window on the server’s display. The classic architecture would be client telling server what to draw, but these days what really happens is that clients draw locally into a buffer and then tell X server to draw the contents of the buffer.

[andrewshadura]

That’s been tried, but most toolkits stopped doing that because it was unreliable, slow, and the number of primitives offered by X wasn’t sufficient for any modern GUI.