Ask HN: Usable remote desktop over WAN
This was a subjective, rather than scientific, test using a few random apps (browsers, text editor, terminal).
On Linux (Xubuntu 14.10 in my test environment):
* NX 4 - it's OK, but still not usable enough in my opinion (over LAN with or without simulated latency/rate limit). Still quite a noticeable lag, scrolling in a Web page for example is not very smooth.
* x2go - required some tweaking and it's about as good as NX 4, maybe slightly worse.
* various VNCs - abandoned because RFB is useless with latency
* X11 forwarding - some apps are OK over LAN, some apps like Chrome are worse than VNC. Add a bit of latency and it's completely useless.
Over WAN I've used MS RDP on 2008R2 to dedicated servers about 30ms away and it has never been anything near usable in my experience. NX on Linux is far more usable.
I also tested Amazon AppStream, which was by far the smoothest and best experience. I used Chrome as the test app and the Windows client. Once the client reached 60 FPS (at 1280x720), it was almost indistinguishable from running locally, even with the 60ms latency to us-east-1. Scrolling was smooth, even on YouTube. YouTube videos were smooth. Unfortunately, it's proprietary, only available hosted from AWS, and Windows-only for the streaming host.
AppStream is the bar to meet or exceed and none of the other solutions get anywhere close. It demonstrated what's possible with a good streaming H.264 implementation. I don't want to use AWS and I want to use Linux, so unless someone knows of another competitive option I've missed, I'm going to try to put together my own H.264 remote desktop implementation and see what I can do. (I may also do some testing with other encoders, H.265, VP8, VP9 at least.)