Comment by gf000

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.