That's true. Remember when moving a window around you just saw the outline of the frame moving and not the whole window? Modern OSes often revert to this mode when using a generic unaccelerated driver.
It still does when you RDP into a box. You can also switch it off as part of the Performance options in the system control panel applet Advanced tab.
Sorry, I'm not familiar with those terms. Do they refer to Winblow$? If so, I don't know, since I only use that at work and don't do any configuration.
Most of the visual effects are frankly just developer chrome nonsense and add nothing to end user productivity.
I largely agree, though find it much easier to move windows around, if I can see the contents, especially at higher resolutions. I remember using Linux on a live CD which booted with a generic driver, in some odd resolution and found the window frame difficult to see when dragging it around.
RDP is Remote Desktop Proctologist; Microsoft's take on VNC.
Though I have to admit, RDP has always been pretty good. Where VNC is essentially just sending highly compressed screenshots to the client (plus a virtual mouse and keyboard device), RDP is highly integrated into the OS. It creates a "virtual video card" of sorts that transmits draw commands and/or H.264 video to the client. This has a side benefit of allowing multiple users to remote into a single machine and each log into their own, unique desktops (even while someone is physically logged onto the RDP host machine).
Technically you can do that too on Linux with a special version of VNC (it essentially replaces the X-Windows server with a VNC service). However, like most other implementations of VNC, it provides poor image quality and isn't nearly as responsive as RDP.
RDP also transmits sound (through a virtual audio device unique to each user logged in), syncs the clipboard between the client and server and is damn fast. Image quality and responsiveness are good enough that you can easily play games remotely without noticeable lag.
Remote Desktop has always been one of the things Microsoft did right, in my opinion. As always, the proprietary nature kept it from being widely used outside of Microsoft's sphere of influence. (Only in the last few years did they finally release a client for iOS and macOS; there are open source implementations, but they use the older versions of the protocol and are reverse engineered, so not 100% stable. AFAIK there's no open source server.)
Apple integrated an enhanced version of VNC into macOS that provides some of the benefits of RDP (clipboard syncing, a virtual screen to allow multiple users to log in, remote scripting support, etc.) through what they call Apple Remote Desktop, or ARD. The one nice thing about that is it's still fully backward compatible with the vanilla VNC protocol, so you can get remote access to your system from basically any platform of the last 20 years (including an original Palm Pilot, which is nice if you wake up and find yourself in 1999, I guess.)
Edit: Uh, that's Remote Desktop
Protocol, not Proctologist; damn autocomplete! Though, that would make for an interesting robot. They do robotic surgery already, why not a remote colonoscopy!
# assman@analcheck:~ ssh rectumroboto@hospital.med