Re: a question on X
I'm nor that familiar with RDP performance now, but I would like to add something about how X11 and RDP differ.
X11 was designed back in the days of low performance networks, so the design is much more client-server than, say RDP. The Client runs on the remote system, and the Server is on your local system, controlling the display and input devices.
For traditional X11 clients, the bulk of the heavy lifting is done by the Server. The Client sends through graphics primitive operations, and the Server then renders these requests onto your local display. This means that for traditional X11 Client programs, the network bandwidth was less of an issue, and the performance of the system running the X11 Server was more important.
I say 'traditional' because many application writers didn't like the constraints placed on them by the X11 protocol and it's supported primitives. What many did was to locally render on the Client into a pixmap (X11's name for a bitmap image) what they wanted to display, and then send the whole pixmap to the Server. This allowed them to use whatever methods they wanted to manipulate the image, at the expense of loading the network with large amounts of data for each displayed frame.
In comparison, RDP, which is really a remote control application of the frame buffer of the console of a remote system, always just sends bitmaps over the network. Because of the inherent inefficiency of this, RDP evolved to just send deltas of the screen, with compression and many other tricks to increase efficiency.
What this means is that traditional X11 clients are probably more efficient and faster than RDP, but clients that render into an X11 pixmap are probably less efficient and slower than RDP.
But X11 has many other advantages. You can have many people running Client programs on a remote system without having to set up lightweight virtual machines or virtual consoles on the remote system. You can also have client programs from many different remote systems displayed simultaneously on your local screen, and cut and paste (as far as it works, it's less flexible than cutting and pasting on Windows) works seamlessly across all clients.
Also, if correctly set up (which is the default on most Linux systems running an X11 server), you cannot easily tell from the appearance which window on your display is local and which is remote. They can overlap, be displayed side-by-side, and behave pretty much the same. There is no "desktop in a window" which is often the case with RDP and VNC, or having to open the remote desktop full screen, obscuring local windows.
But X11 will almost certainly be slower than Wayland (and MS Windows applications) if the Client runs on the same system as you are working on, even though a number of speed-ups have been added to the X.org server since the days of MIT X11 (before XFree86 and the X.org fork of that). X11 has been around a long time in one form or another, and some of it's benefits are also it's weaknesses.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
