Any way to use compose desktop as something like a Flow<Bitmap> (or something) instead of rendering to screen?

What are the specifics of what you trying to accomplish?

I think he means instead of rendering a composition to a screen, have it headless and render to

Flow<Bitmap>

instead (basically each render cycle emits a screenshot of the entire app to the flow)

Exactly

That should definitelly be possible, but not available out of the box. This kind of "rendering" would actualy unlock SSR for compose-web, so I'm sure we'll get to it eventually.

I'm not sure but I don't think we need to get rid of Skia. Pure software rendering is too slow. And Chrome also uses Skia for rendering while still supporting casting web pages through Google Cast.