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Can anyone weigh in on the speed, responsiveness, reliability and flexibility of the following two options:

  • Using RDP to remotely access a Windows machine from a Windows machine

  • Using NX to remotely access a Linux machine from a Linux machine (or a Windows machine if not much different)

The application I would run on either guest is the same. If the approaches perform about as well as each other, I'd prefer the second for security reasons pertaining to Linux. However if NX is going to be significantly slower, I may reluctantly go with RDP and Windows for the time being.

Please mention the variety or varieties of NX you have experience with (FreeNX, NeatX, x2go, etc.) Thanks!

user1076482
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  • So, try all the suitable hosts/clients and see which works best for you? This is "not a real question" and "off topic" in SO terms. Perhaps the superuser stack? –  Dec 01 '11 at 23:53

1 Answers1

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The short answer is that it really depends on what the application does, NX can be quite efficient with applications that draw using X11 primitives, much less so for graphical/video.

As for the different NX varieties: FreeNX is unmaintained, so is NeatX, and you forgot winswitch. When it comes to performance, which implementation you choose makes no difference since they all rely on the same NX libraries for remoting the display (assuming they do not misconfigure the link parameters), the only thing they change is the way they manage the sessions (the UI) and the client-server protocol used for the GUI app (which has no impact on performance).

It is now at least as efficient as RDP and NX so you may also want to give xpra a go.

totaam
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