[Nextgrid]

Wasn't aware SPICE was deprecated. However, I think it addresses a different use-case than RDP: SPICE is primarily designed for accessing virtual machines by connecting to their hypervisor. Thus it's designed to operate without VM guest awareness nor cooperation, going purely from a framebuffer.

This approach is fundamentally limited in terms of performance/responsiveness, as you're ultimately just trying to "guess" what's happening and apply best-effort techniques to speed things up, falling back to just using a video stream.

A proper remote desktop solution like RDP on Windows works in cooperation with the OS's GUI subsystem in a way that makes the RDP server aware of the GUI events, so it doesn't have to guess, and can offload compositing and some 2D operations directly to the client, rather than sending rendered bitmaps.

Thus it didn't catch on because it focuses on a narrow use-case nobody should be using except in emergency/break-glass situations (you should instead be remoting into the VM directly, for reasons explained above), and even for such situations, it didn't offer anything substantial over VNC, except everyone and their dog has a VNC client by now, but good luck finding a functional SPICE client for anything but Linux.