X2Go (the OSS fork of "nx - no machine") works really well over a network. Though I really think it might be best to do the rendering client-side and push video

X2Go (the OSS fork of "nx - no machine") works really well over a network. Though I really think it might be best to do the rendering client-side and push video frames. Though I do concede that the two models are really two separate ways to do computing, based on where your actual compute resources are located. With X11 forwarding, the rendering happens server-side, at the user's terminal [1], while with e.g. VNC the rendering happens client-side on the remote machine and the video frame is presented to the user, who is basically sitting at a dumb terminal. HTML delivered over HTTP would be the most wide-spread technology that uses user-side rendering today. [1] The terminology might seem weird to you with the server-side being the user's side, or what you'd usually term the "client", but it makes sense - you run the X11 server on your PC, then connect over the network to a remote host using e.g. SSH, so now you have an X11 server and an SSH client running on your PC, connected to an SSH server on the remote. Then you open a socket on the remote side connected to the X11 socket on the local side via the SSH tunnel and remote programs initiate connections to your X11 server. You type at your terminal, that gets picked up by your SSH client and sent to the SSH server, the SSH server relays your typing to the remote shell, which execs the remote X11 client, which connects to your X11 server. Simple!