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There was a lot of work done to make X11 work better over low bandwidth/high latency links. [0] But in the end you could get most of the benefits just by forwar
by mprovost 6y ago
There was a lot of work done to make X11 work better over low bandwidth/high latency links. [0] But in the end you could get most of the benefits just by forwarding your X session over SSH with compression enabled. Although X11 is old enough that compression would have used too much CPU back when it was developed.
The more interesting comparison between X forwarding and VNC is that X is really only displaying a remote application locally, not an entire screen or desktop. (Unless you use xnest to run X inside X which is pretty cool.) I used to have a FreeBSD workstation with a browser window running on a Linux server and a bunch of terminal windows spun up on different Sun servers, and you couldn't tell the difference between your local and remote windows. Remote windows are first class citizens in X11.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Bandwidth_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Bandwidth_X
- StillBored 6y agoA better comparison with X is the RDP protocol, which too is an API level protocol (its basically forwarding large parts of the windows GDI interface). OTOH, the big strength of RDP is the async stream requests. This gives it a much lower apparent latency than X, but it can also do the VNC thing and render/compress parts of the UI on the remote machine.