Stephan Seitz <stse+devuan@???> wrote:

> Äh, why do you need X11 forwarding for text work? For me text work is shell/vi/mutt/screen. I’m using these programs daily without the need for X11 forwarding.

I don't, but sometimes it just happens that way.

> And as far as I was told things like VNC or RDP are an improvement for remote desktops and WAN connections. And yes, I did rdp via modem connections.

VNC is lousy over anything but a very fast link, it's just a remote framebuffer - anything painted to the screen is bit copied to the client which is bandwidth intensive. It's what underlies Apple's emote control option, and running over a low link (eg 400kbps ADSL uplink) it's painfully slow - think "scroll a window, sit back and wait while the screen updates".

AIUI, RDP is very much like X - other than painting bitmaps and such things, updates are done by passing the primitives to the display server to be drawn. So instead of sending a few hundred or a few thousand bytes of bitmap to draw a rectangle, the instruction to draw a rectangle of a specific type and size at a specific place is sent. That's why it works well over low bandwidth connections.