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Chris Siebenmann over on his personal web page at the University of Toronto writes about X networking. He points out two main shortcomings preventing realization of the original vision of network transparancy. One is network speed and latency. The other is a too narrow scope for X's communication facilities.
X's network transparency was not designed as 'it will run xterm well'; originally it was to be something that should let you run almost everything remotely, providing a full environment. Even apart from the practical issues covered in Daniel Stone's slide presentation [warning for PDF], it's clear that it's been years since X could deliver a real first class environment over the network. You cannot operate with X over the network in the same way that you do locally. Trying to do so is painful and involves many things that either don't work at all or perform so badly that you don't want to use them.
Remote display protocols remain useful, but it's time to admit another way will have to be found. What's the latest word on Wayland or Mir?
Source : X's network transparency has wound up mostly being a failure
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:45AM
XCB was a huge improvement. I've written code that used it, and the model is pretty nice. You can fit it into an actor-model programming environment and defer waiting for the acks for a long time. Having XLib implemented on top of XCB simplified the XLib code a lot, but didn't really help anything using XLib, because you're still using a synchronous API on top, so the XLib APIs end up doing an async call and then blocking on the result. I don't know what the status of other toolkits moving to XCB is, but it had the potential for a lot of improvements.
The problem for X font handling was somewhat inherent in the client-server design. If you want to support fairly dumb X terminals running an X server and nothing else, then you don't want to put font handling there because installing a new font means adding the font to the terminal (which may not even have writeable storage). The XRender extension actually has a pretty sensible way of dealing with fonts. The client renders each glyph into a texture and transfers it to the server, the server can then composite the glyphs into the correct place. This is exactly the same model that Quartz uses on OS X. That said, most things using Cairo don't actually use XRENDER this way, they instead render in software on the client and send the resulting image to the server. At least if they use XDAMAGE they're not sending an entire window contents every time a cursor blinks though...
sudo mod me up