Actually, RDP is GDI over the wire, which is not too dissimilar from X.
RDP has efficiency gains because clients send pixmaps over the wire to be stored on the server, and then send draw calls to display those pixmaps in certain places, composing a display. You can do this with X11 too, but the GTK developers don't want to because using the protocol is hard ;_;
gtk+ certainly does use server-side textures and positioned draws. That is why the documentation is so adamant about using API like create_similar_surface().
Even the pixelcache uses server-side textures when available.
This is what Xshm does and why everything modern uses it. You get a server-side texture, but mapped into client address space so you can do direct draws and then XCopyArea() into your final ___location for double-buffering.
But gtk+ isn't really in the position to be able to control everything so precisely all the way down the driver stack to network transparency layers. So unless you connect to our process directly, like the HTML5 broadway backend, there is only so much we can do.
The broadway backend does employ various techniques to reduce the amount of content passed using a sort of rolling hash.
If you want to optimize for choppy networks that have too much packet loss for interactive TCP applications , then the current X11 is not a good fit. But that would be a whole different niche.
Could have sworn that there exist multiple takes on extensions for that, but none that has been rolled into Xorg proper. This either because lisencing, or because the current devs have GPU stars in their eyes.
BTW, it is downright funny how just about every Gnome guy i have encountered online seems to come across a pedantic grump. that would not know a joke if it fell on his head...
you've mentioned something i've not heard about without linking to it or providing a name to help me find it myself. so i'm not sure what you'd like from me.
