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I recommend you check out https://mosh.mit.edu/ to speed up the felt latency of the connection.

I'd never heard of mosh before but this is just what I've been looking for.

here's the previous discussion on hn. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382

It depends on whether or not vnc is bandwidth limited on your link. A high bandwidth, high-latency connection shouldn't feel significanlty different over vnc or a terminal, but if your high-latency is due to being bandwith-limited, vnc will be much worse.

i3 is your tiled window manager. You just open your terminal and connect on ssh as usual. i3 wouldn't have anything to do with your connection to the ssh session.