Starting a new topic to focus discussion a the point made in another topic by @mconti :
Regardless of the file-system to which state files are saved, I strongly agree that when in client/server mode all data (specifically talking about but not limited to things like images here - background, logo, path traced environment, etc.) used in the session should come from the same file-system, so the server.
Currently at least those three mentioned sources (logo, background, path traced environment) need be loaded from the client-side machine, so one ends up with a state file that has paths unique to their local machine and thus makes the state file completely unshareable.
I acknowledge that there is a valid counter-argument. That one may not have the images needed on the server, and the typical user may have some trouble pushing them to the server (though I would argue that by saying learning scp is simple enough).
However, I believe that implementing the solution proposed by @mconti and I to solve this issue of surrendering state files useless on any other machine easily outweighs the merits of that counter-argument.
I also acknowledge that another possible solution is to provide the user the option as to which file-system to use for these sources, as has been discussed to address a separate issue in another thread:
https://discourse.paraview.org/t/proposed-general-rule-for-save-and-load-supported-files-on-remote-and-or-local-filesystems/5398
But that’s probably unnecessarily complex. I think it’s reasonable to just say that in client/server mode all input comes from the server. As to where all output goes is another story… 