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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

One thing to keep an eye on for Unix remote work is Red Hat's SPICE remote desktop protocol. It was originally meant to support remoting to virtual machines and the server thus built into QEMU, but there's also a standalone server now that appears as an X server to X clients, called xspice. xspice is still young and immature, but already packaged in Fedora.

SPICE also keeps coming up as a possible solution to the lack of built-in network translucency in Wayland, the technology many would like to see replace X down the road.

Especially with NoMachine's NX 4 going closed source (previous versions were partially open, allowing others to replace the closed parts and produce a fully open stack), I'm looking to SPICE as a replacement.

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xpra is also worth looking at. I's much faster than X forwarding or VNC, and it's much simpler to set up than NX. On Debian and Ubuntu, it's just an apt-get away. The usage is straightforward

On the remote machine which will export the application(s):

xpra start :100

export DISPLAY=:100

xterm

On your local machine, you would use something like:

xpra attach ssh:serverhostname:100

You can even detach the windows(s) from one computer and reattach from another, like GNU Screen.

http://xpra.org/

Thanks, I had heard about that shortly after the initial release but since lost sight of it. Sure reads like the authors have made a lot of progress and the repo looks pretty active, too. Will give it a try.

Perfect! I've been looking for something like this a long time. Thanks so much for mentioning it.

There are existing NX implementations that work really well, though, e.g. OpenNX (client) + FreeNX (server). While xspice has potential, for now (and forward, should xspice not "get there") NX is a viable option.

Definitely, I use NX myself daily at the moment. The Windows client sucks (slow, no free resize as in the Linux client, lots of clipboard problems), but Linux-to-Linux is quite awesome.

One problem is that NX 3 doesn't support newer X extensions like COMPOSITE and DAMAGE, though. NX 4 does, but is no longer open. So the future viability is kind of starting to break down already, if you ask me.

Windows NX client treats me well. The lack of free resize hasn't bothered me yet as my workstation is really just a thin client with Outlook, so I just maximize the NX session.

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