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by ivansavz 4731 days ago
This could be made VERY interesting if you also add an NX server in the mix. I find basic X11 connections via ssh to be rather laggy and unpleasant to use when the internet connection is not top.

The idea behind NX is to "fake" an X client on the server side and fake a NX server on the client side. This reduces the number of roundtrips required for each action. The improved responsiveness is dramatic -- even on a low speed and high-latency link, using the remote desktop feels like a local machine...

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology

Unfortunately, the two open source projects which aimed to reproduce the NX functionality seem to have been abandoned.

    http://freenx.berlios.de/
    http://code.google.com/p/neatx/source/list
Is anyone using NX these days? Perhaps, people stopped developing these because they work well already?
4 comments

Take a look at xpra instead. The performance is much beter than X11 forwarding when you don't have a low latency connection.

http://xpra.org/

Thanks for your reply! I tried xpra and it seems to be much better! It also fixed the issue with the keyboard messed-up on Mac OSX. I will publish an update on GitHub soon!
Ok!
X2Go[1] is under active development and to my understanding it's based on NX libraries. It might be a good alternative. I have only tried it briefly and not over WAN, but it worked quite good over WLAN at least.

[1]: http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/start

We're using NX/x2go for working from home or, sometimes but fortunately not too often, less likely remote places such as weekend holiday places. It does work well. I wouldn't go as far as saying it feels like a local machine, and it's not as responsive as regular X over a fast LAN, either. But it's very usable.
I didn't know NX! Thanks for suggesting it Ivan! I will try it !
Give x2go a try first (it's based on nx). In my experience it has been far less fiddly than freenx or neatx.
Ok. I will! It seems to be more up to date. Thanks