Ah, Wayland. Yet another example of the successor to a system being less capable than the system it replaces.
"Wayland does not currently provide network transparency, but it may in the future. It was attempted as a Google Summer of Code project in 2011, but was not successful. Adam Jackson has envisioned providing remote access to a Wayland application by either 'pixel-scraping' (like VNC) or getting it to send a "rendering command stream" across the network (as in RDP, SPICE or X11). As of early 2013, Høgsberg is experimenting with network transparency using a proxy Wayland server which sends compressed images to the real compositor."
It turns out that in this day and age, desktop users much prefer pixel-perfect tear-free rendering to network transparency. Wayland is X11 without the legacy cruft -- and it turns out that the only thing left in X11 that's not legacy cruft -- like seriously, bleeding-edge tech for 1986 -- is a centralized way to hand out direct-rendering frame buffers to user processes and composite them together for the final image. Which is exactly the extent to which modern apps use X11.
Remote access can be achieved by running a special Wayland server on the remote side that connects to a Wayland client on the local side and exchanges framebuffer and event data with that client. In this setup, apps can talk Wayland and not even be aware that their display is being networked; they are also completely decoupled from the remoting protocol which can be anything. RDP and streaming h.264 would be good choices, certainly better than legacy X protocol.
It's historically been basically impossible to guarantee a tear- or glitch-free display under X because it was impossible in the protocol to sync display updates to vblank.
The XPresent extension may ameliorate this, but adding yet another extension to a protocol already lousy with them, such that they have to be tested for at runtime, is pretty much polishing a turd at this point. Starting from scratch is the correct approach and even the X.Org foundation advocates Wayland as X's replacement.
"Wayland does not currently provide network transparency, but it may in the future. It was attempted as a Google Summer of Code project in 2011, but was not successful. Adam Jackson has envisioned providing remote access to a Wayland application by either 'pixel-scraping' (like VNC) or getting it to send a "rendering command stream" across the network (as in RDP, SPICE or X11). As of early 2013, Høgsberg is experimenting with network transparency using a proxy Wayland server which sends compressed images to the real compositor."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_prot...