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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Sure but most regular consumer or business applications don't really need that level of graphical power. Rendering a menu or button or blurb of text locally from some layout language is always going to be more performant than streaming raw pixels from a server.

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It would be, if everyone agreed on a toolkit. As it as, at least X11, AFAIK Wayland, and Windows/RDP ended up just throwing pixels over the wire because every program renders text/menus/whatever differently.

I wonder what the world would look like if we decoupled what something is supposed to be and what data it's supposed to have, from how it actually looks and acts. Say, some "lowest common denominator" that works reasonably across all platforms.

For example, I'd say that I need:

  A dropdown for a single option, with options: A, B, C

And let the device itself decide what needs to be displayed in the native GUI toolkit. Then just send that specification over the wire, instead of needlessly wasting the bandwidth on lots of pixels.

Actually, I think I'm just describing an analogue to HTML with the equivalent of CSS provided by the platform, but for native desktop toolkits (hopefully without the complexity of a browser engine).

RDP does not mostly do that. It sends higher level commands like text and geometry placement. That’s why it performs 10x better than the competition.

Actually it does do that, since about 2010: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3972/nvidia-gtc-2010-wrapup/3

RDP doesn't perform even 0x better than the competition, like parsec.

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