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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

NoMachine is ok...if you haven't spent much time in RDP. Windows RDP is so far ahead of anything else out there it puts them all to shame. I use RDP for work all day long and I couldn't find a workable solution that would have a similar experience on Mac/Linux. And these machines are all on the local network!

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I've literally never found anything better than the NX-based NoMachine (I think version 3 was the last one to support it). I'll never understand why they downgraded themselves to yet another desktop video stream. If you can find a copy of the older version or one of the open source replacements (freenx? x2go?) it's worth it.

I was able to use my home computer lag-free at my highschool when it was at home sitting behind a shitty ADSL connection. Later I used it at college with my computer at the dorm with a 100k/sec upload cap (enforced to discourage student file sharing). It pulled some dirty tricks with X forwarding, caching pixmaps, and jpegging the hell out of the individual elements, but it really felt like the computer I was using was right there.

I've found, over NoMachine and even RDP, that Parsec is hands down the best solution that I've encountered because of how low-latency it is. It might not support all the input methods/etc. that RDP does (IIUC RDP has good touchscreen support), but Parsec is faster than everything else.

thanks for this input! Parsec looks promising

This matches my experience. With a Gigabit Ethernet connection, I find it very difficult to distinguish a desktop streamed via Parsec from a local one. RDP is noticeably laggy in comparison. I would even say that Parsec over a good internet connection (a few 10 MBit, ~10 ms ping) feels more responsive than RDP over LAN.

What I don't like is that Parsec relies on third-party servers for the session initiation, and that streaming Linux desktops is currently not supported. Maybe the open source implementations of Nvidia's GameStream (Moonlight and Sunshine) could be an alternative.

Interestingly the RDP client on the mac app store is really good.

Its better than the Windows client because it just works as another desktop in the Mac OS, with no bar at the top, and you can jump in to and out of various remote session quickly just by switching desktops with Cmd+left or right arrows. Its a really simple, nice to use implementation.

I requested that feature for Windows RDP client over 2 years ago to no avail. Sort of surprising they made it work like this on Mac, but not on Windows.

This was the case 10 years ago too iirc. Windows RDP is excellent. Wish Linux RDP worked as well.

For me it's the opposite when it comes to lan. Vnc is buttery smooth with no perceivable delay, while RDP still seems to limit to some low-ish fps.

For low bandwidth/high latency links, RDP easily wins.

How is Parsec actually in comparison? Never tried RDP but Parsec just blew my mind

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