All the Linux remote desktop server solutions are bad enough over a WAN that I typically VPN into my office, then RDC from my home Windows box into my office Windows box, then ssh -X from there into my office Linux box. It's kinda crazy, but it works better than anything else I've found, and I've tried almost all the options mentioned here. I wish there was a better way, but I don't think there is (for me)...
You are not alone. I am doing it too. RDP on Windows is far superior than VNC in overall.
If you don't care about X11 security at all (e.g. LAN, but be careful!) you can set $DISPLAY in the ssh session without -X option. I found it unencrypted X11 is a way faster than ssh -X forwarding.
Really? I agree "a new remote desktop" makes me suspicious about usage over WAN because most all suck. I didn't have great luck with Windows Remote Desktop, either. We went with TurboVNC/VirtualGL on the server and recommended, I think, TurboVNC on the client (via ssh). I used macOS Screen Sharing.app because it wasn't Java and was more comfortable to use IMHO (with things like screen scaling and fullscreen). Most other VNC clients performed significantly worse. I usually ran the desktop around 1440x900.
This seemed to be the best setup with high latency and low bandwidth situations. We had people spanning the furthest time zone.
Well, it's been a while, but the last time I tried VNC it was much, much slower than RDP. Also, (and I haven't really thought deeply about why this is) I much prefer "remote desktop" solutions (like RDC) to "screen sharing" solutions (like VNC, TeamViewer, AnyDesk) for day-to-day work. (That having been said, I love TeamViewer for helping my parents with their computer issues. But luckily I don't have to do that too often.) My ideal is something like ssh, but, you know, with graphics. So I should be able to login with my usual credentials, and not have to set a special uber-password that can hypothetically allow someone to connect to an ongoing root session (like VNC does). Bonus points if it's installed by default and I don't really have to configure the server. Windows RDP does all of this.
I've never got this working, but it seems like the best combo, is there an easy GUI way to connect to VirtualGL / TurboVNC and tutorial to do the server side, it didn't look straightforward when I looked a few years ago.
Sorry. Our sysadmin had set it up. We relied on OpenGL applications and had multiple users, so we weren't using :0. I thought I got it working (sans OpenGL/VirtualGL) by just installing the rpm, then each user would run `vncserver -geometry 1440x900 :89` (their per-user port) to launch the server, then connect via the client.
We did have issues periodically. Mostly because the workstations were mostly not interactive, but if someone would plugin or unplug a monitor X would change configuration on the next reboot. Or when we had multiple GPUs we'd tweak things. I wish I kept better notes.
