No one remembers the "No Machine" NX protocol (X protocol with compression, without unnecessary roundtrips and some other optimizations)? I think I've tried it in the early 2000's, looks like they are still alive[0]

With version 4 of their protocol they went closed source, but before that it was released as GPL (don't remember if it was the case of their client/server, IIRC they were proprietary) anyway I think V3 is used in the X2Go[1] client/server. There was also a Goggle client in Python years ago...

[0] https://www.nomachine.com/

[1] https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:newtox2go

NoMachine essentially made themselves irrelevant by not upgrading their client software often enough, IMHO. I was using all sorts of VNC hackery to make it fast and loved NX, but it was weird and niche (never worked quite right on the Mac) and still slow when compared to RDP and Citrix, so the rise of Ansible and other sorts of automation blew it out of the water for server management.

For end-users, Citrix was just way better, even if more expensive, and there was no compelling reason to switch...

I use x2go actively for all my servers. It is very fast, even over slow connections (much better performance then VNC and RDP used to have) -- thanks to great compression techniques (so do not expect 256 colours when connecting over GSM network). It is a lovely piece of (OSS!) software.

Nice to hear it's working well.

I found out today that X2Go version 4.1 is available on Debian Stretch via "backports"; I don't need it at the moment but if I'm bored in the future, I could play with it without much friction...

Can Nomachine/X2go run a server on a windows machine?

X2Go shouldn't work, unless you intend to run it on a VM or maybe the WSL as it's a modified Xorg X11 server, but probably it's not what you are asking.

NoMachine, according to their download page, should support Windos/Mac/Linux on the server front, but I don't have a direct experience.

NoMachine runs on a Windows server. It accesses the remote desktop. But if what you want is a Terminal Server like NoMachine's Terminal Server for Linux, I think you'll be disappointed. That's not possible from a legal perspective.

Ten years ago, UltraVNC or RDP were the fastest remote desktop options for Windows. I also can recommend TeamViewer, despite it has a slightly different focus.

I used it until a few month ago: it worked better (lower latency and no need to specify the resolution) than VNC but clion doesn't work well with NX, so I switched to VNC.

No. The X protocol is objectively shit. It's so shit, modern toolkits don't even fully use it anymore. Instead they do all rendering locally and pipe the composited pixmaps over to the X server via DRI. Over a network, guess what? No DRI. Meaning uncompressed pixmaps get sent over that network link every time a redraw happens.

Wayland, Pipewire, and H.265 will be a much better general solution to remote desktop access. In the meantime, VSCode via browser is a MUCH better approach than trying to forward it over X over any but the fastest network links.

To clarify your statement about Wayland, it doesn't support remote desktop access in itself [1]. A remote desktop server would sit on top of Wayland.

[1] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8

X forwarding is very slow. Some potential reasons are discussed here : https://superuser.com/questions/1217280/why-is-x11-forwardin...

I like X-forwarding in general, but VSCode and other electron-based apps really run like ass over remote X11.

Definitely not recommended.

That's just a different kind of complexity to transmit interactions and UI rendering. It's built for much more general usage which is why it fails at a fine-grained low-latency coding experience on anything other than a LAN.

Yeah that doesn't really cut it for remoting over the internet into a VM in the cloud. As far as securing this it's as simple as tossing a few lines into your reverse proxy config.

Because there’s nothing simpler than X11, right!? Also there's no dependency on docker - that's just a demo.

I tried that in the past and it's unusable over typical internet latency.

Or simply mount a dir with sshfs or similar :)

I’d rather use the tooling of VSCode than ssh into some shoddy configuration of vim

> I’d rather use the tooling of VSCode

What they're suggesting allow you to do just that.

X forwarding is not secure at all.

Over an SSH tunnel?

And impossible using Wayland