I am not sure which GP you are referring too, since I am a heavy user of the original NoMachine, and it has incredibly better latency even when used over long-latency links (or should I say: specially when used over long-latency links). The new commercial NoMachine also uses H264 and I outright refuse to upgrade to it since it's just worse -- though it makes commercial sense for them since they want to support Windows.
But also just ask anyone who has used RDP versus something like VNC.
I'm surprised by your account, and glad that you've given it. This is mine:
In high school, I was a Linux hobbyist and I also had a habit of forgetting and losing documents I needed for school. Additionally, the school's computers not completely locked down, but the selection of software on them was very limited.
So I played with a lot of remote access solutions for accessing my home desktop, both to do things on it that I couldn't do at school (like browse an uncensored web or using an IDE I couldn't install on the school computers) and to access my files or even running applications. I tested a lot of stuff, both with Windows clients and with Linux clients (but I was limited to the former at school).
I tried X2Go, TigerVNC, plain Xpra, SSH (with normal and insecure forwarding, with and without compression), NX (FreeNX on the server, but with the proprietary client alongside several open-source clients), and WinSwitch, which was some nice tooling built around Xpra. (On the LAN, I even messed around with VirtualGL for 3D acceleration with remote applications.)
Xpra was the preferred choice, and WinSwitch using Xpra and H.264 encoding worked best for me when I was away from home. Using plain X forwarding, I noticed that some applications were painfully laggy, especially Eclipse and Firefox. But even with my modest home internet connection (with especially low bandwidth on the uplink), the H.264-based solutions were very usable for any application I threw at them.
> But also just ask anyone who has used RDP versus something like VNC.
For connecting to full desktop sessions, I remember tigervnc being way faster than x11rdp.
Your usecase is actually quite close to mine. Except that NoMachine was the fastest of them all. I didn't try to run Firefox (why? you can proxy and browse locally!), but I had to use it to run software that could only be run on premises. And, basically, anything that was not NX incurred a huge latency that made using it a maddening experience.
For me, nxproxy/nxagent is basically the equivalent of mosh compared to SSH. If you have never felt the need to use mosh, then your link is not a high latency one.
Note that to my knowledge there is no actual implementation of an RDP server for Linux; they all just send do VNC over RDP (i.e. send bitmaps).
I remember NX being pretty good. I don't really remember why I ended up using Xpra more, but I used it for individual applications. I usually used NX only for full desktop sessions. And I only had whatever version of FreeNX I could get set up server side, which I remember being difficult, so maybe proper NoMachine NX would have been better.
I also never really dug into how Xpra used image encoders in its whole process. There's this diagram in the old (probably outdated) docs:
It seems more sophisticated to me than just a VNC approach, since it lets you send over the individual windows. There's this note on the current docs:
> Choosing which encoding to use for a given window is best left to the xpra engine.
It will make this decision using the window's characteristics (size, state, metadata, etc), network performance (latency, congestion, etc), user preference, client and server capabilities and performance, etc
I'm not sure if that's more selective or cleverer than NX's approach, or basically the same. I wonder now whether it was latency, bandwidth, or processing power on the client (all we had was IGPUs) that was scarcest for me back then.
> For me, nxproxy/nxagent is basically the equivalent of mosh compared to SSH. If you have never felt the need to use mosh, then your link is not a high latency one.
I think plain SSH worked fine for me back then, though, so maybe latency was less of a problem for me than it has been for your use cases. Mosh is great though, especially for cellular internet connections.
> But also just ask anyone who has used RDP versus something like VNC.
I'm not sure I follow. While VNC and RDP are very different protocols, they ultimately both work by sending bitmaps of the server screen to the client.
Recent versions of RDP use H264 encoding, under the name "RemoteFX". I believe commercial VNC implementations do the same, although the free ones seem to be sticking with their own encoding schemes, as they believe they're better optimized for desktop content, but they're both still streaming bitmaps.
In any event, like others have mentioned, X11 forwarding has degraded over time to the point I only use it when working with locally hosted VMs. While old X software works well with it (xterm, motif toolkit stuff, things directly using xlib/xcb) modern applications like web browsers and the newer Qt/GTK libraries just don't handle latency well at all. They may be sending vector operations, but they're sending tons of small vector operations, which TCP overhead and network latency really hurts. And applications using libraries like Skia (which includes LibreOffice) are doing local rendering and just pushing bitmaps out.
I think X forwarding is conceptually better, but only if applications are really using X idiomatically, which they aren't.
RDP does not stream H264 -- RemoteFX needs a (v)GPU, so it is not the default. In fact you can go an peruse the local/persistent RDP cache and see it full of standard Windows GUI bitmaps.
My point was that both RDP and VNC display the remote screen by sending bitmaps over the wire. You can view the contents of the RDP bitmap cache and see that, while some UI elements are being "intelligently" selected, it's largely rectangular chunks of the screen, not unlike VNC.
Both can send bitmaps, but RDP can and does send graphics (and even text!) rendering commands. You can even influence how text is antialiased on the client. And even "dumb" VNC benefits from having more specific damage (as in, "areas of the screen that changed") than just a generic "all the screen changed, here's the new framebuffer, go figure it out".
But also just ask anyone who has used RDP versus something like VNC.