> But also just ask anyone who has used RDP versus something like VNC. I'm not sure I follow. While VNC and RDP are very different protocols, they ultimately b

> But also just ask anyone who has used RDP versus something like VNC. I'm not sure I follow. While VNC and RDP are very different protocols, they ultimately both work by sending bitmaps of the server screen to the client. Recent versions of RDP use H264 encoding, under the name "RemoteFX". I believe commercial VNC implementations do the same, although the free ones seem to be sticking with their own encoding schemes, as they believe they're better optimized for desktop content, but they're both still streaming bitmaps. In any event, like others have mentioned, X11 forwarding has degraded over time to the point I only use it when working with locally hosted VMs. While old X software works well with it (xterm, motif toolkit stuff, things directly using xlib/xcb) modern applications like web browsers and the newer Qt/GTK libraries just don't handle latency well at all. They may be sending vector operations, but they're sending tons of small vector operations, which TCP overhead and network latency really hurts. And applications using libraries like Skia (which includes LibreOffice) are doing local rendering and just pushing bitmaps out. I think X forwarding is conceptually better, but only if applications are really using X idiomatically, which they aren't.