+1 for Windows RDP. One thing Windows RDP excels at is working over low bandwidth connections. My remote desktop is in a rural area with very poor internet service -- uploads under 1 Mb/sec. With Win RDP I set the "Experience" to "56k Modem" (not joking) and it eliminates eye candy stuff like font smoothing and window animations, which is fine, at least I have a steady connection that works. I've tried other RDP programs and they always say "connection lost" due to insufficient bandwidth.

For VMs, I find RDP to be on par with SPICE (which is more of a qemu/libvirt thing). Both have support for device/drive mapping, I believe. That's both over ssh sessions (I know RDP has encryption, but I'd rather not trust it).

IIRC it hasn't worked like that since Windows 10. It's more or less h264. As due to Electron, QT, and UWP nothing draws those primitives anymore.

RDP itself in its earliest versions is just a windows GDI async RPC. Which is why its so fantastically fast/responsive on windows. And as of last time I mess with this, thats the way it still behaves for things like MS office, and basically anything that is older than a half dozen years or so, because they are still sitting on the win32 GDI.

But, yes your right if you have a "modern" application that is basically doing all the drawing on the CPU to a generic canvas with custom libraries none of that works, and RDP has to fall back to diffing and compressing. Which is really terrible on any number of fronts.

At that point you might as well just use VNC because the perf is going to be roughly the same.

Progress!

The ui of modern Office is React Native