[NXdev]

NoMachine offers two methods when delivering a remote Linux/Unix desktop: 1) NX in 'lightweight mode', mainly using advanced compression and caching of the X11 protocol and 2) NX using hardware accelerated video encoding and decoding.

The first method is the preferred option when connecting to legacy X11 applications, i.e. applications making mostly use of traditional X11 Render operations and X11 vector graphics. In this 'lightweight mode' NX reduces both the bandwidth usage and the HW requirements on the client and the server to the very minimum, by employing the expensive video encoding operations only when detecting that the server-side application is producing video data on the screen.

Unfortunately this 'lightweight mode' can't deliver games, a Mac or Windows desktop, as well as most contemporary Unix/Linux desktop environments. The reason, in the latter case, is the inefficient way these applications use the X11 protocol, as well as the inability of the X11 protocol to deal with modern graphics. In these cases, the use of video encoding is unavoidable. NX employs a number of different techniques to reduce the CPU consumption and the bandwidth needed, so much to often make video encoding advantageous even compared to the legacy X11 protocol compression. But, of course, the final results always depend on the screen content being deployed.

Disclaimer: I work for NoMachine

[yourapostasy]

Thank you for the clarification, that helps explain a lot. Next time I fly and/or hit a 3G area I'll try running the older X Window manager fvwm v2.x under NoMachine and compare to the RDP-based results. I'd really prefer to work with NoMachine because it preserves my Linux- and BSD-based stack, so if it works as well as RDP I'll try to remember to post back here my results.