Protocol-wise I'm aware, but it seems a better fit technically for windows than x11. Making a performant client for linux should be doable, but creating a serve

Protocol-wise I'm aware, but it seems a better fit technically for windows than x11. Making a performant client for linux should be doable, but creating a server that takes advantage of all the protocol features sounds like a much greater effort. And yes, it seems in general something was wrong in your vnc setup. I was doing fullhd back then and typing or moving smaller Windows was near instant, maybe 100ms delay if the window was larger or the screen busy. Even video playback in YouTube was smooth (with occasionally dropped frames) as long as I kept it at the default size, which was surprising. On another note, a few days ago for reasons I had to access a machine at work running xfce. Used VNC via SSH tunnel and didn't expect too much, since last I checked the protocol was very sensitive to latency, but it was a pretty smooth experience still. Maybe those tigervnc folks are still busy tweaking it. Will try freerdp next time :-)