Setup – The environment I tested consists of the following components:

1. A server, in my case a Debian Etch
2. A client, mac OS X Tiger on a macbook
3. X11 on OS X
4. freenx server-3.2.0-13 from No Machine
5. nxclient-3.2.0-9, there are other platforms.
6. A window manager on the server, I use e17 (see screenshot in the end)
7. In case you wonder, my connection is an Adsl 2+ with 14mbps down and 1mbps up.  Ping to the server under normal network load is 20ms.

Performance – “Wow”, that’s all I can say. The performance is just great! Compared to RDP, I think they are on the same level, or possibly better: the special effects (animations) in e17 worked flawlessly, the transitions were smooth. Flipping desktop had a little delay, not quite noticable though. During usage it uses approximately 20kb/s (kilobytes) of the pipe.

Security – You shouldn’t worry about security as NX traffics are tunneled through SSH by default, hence you only need to open port 22 on the server side.

QtNX – George Wright released a QT-based nxclient for OS X. This is an alternative of nxclient if you dislike the X11-aqua-like interface components.

Drawbacks – First is its X11 requirement, this means a lot of things; like no clip-board integration.  GDM (or any Desktop manager) doesn’t support NX (as of this writing). This can be worked around pretty easily with a wrapper (or I hope so). I’m considering to add it to my projects queue.

Experiments – In the future some hard-benchmarks can prove freenx’ competence. For now it has convinced me enough.

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