so, you have a SBC Linux board in a machine inside your rack, you have connected to it, and set compression_enabled=yes (of course yes) in the sshd config file, as well as you have exported the DISPLAY to your x11 client (mobaXterm on Windows)
export DISPLAY=192.168.1.12:0.0
then you launch Firefox, it points to Apple dot com ( I don't know why it happened, but it's irrelevant ) and ... here you can enjoy the fresh and genuine frustration at observing that X11 is so inefficient with big-bitmap stuff
Ok, digging under the hood, makes you learn that the X11 protocol was never meant to handle bitmaps intensive operations (oh, and modern websites really need to have a ton of them), rather back in the day when X11 was first designed computer graphics were a lot simpler than they are today.
But who on Earth wants static text and static little pics in static HTML?!?!?
A webpage is considered shitty, poor, and ridiculous if it doesn't come with billion of animated junk around, but this is not OK for X11 since it doesn't send the screen to your computer, rather it sends the display-instructions so the X-server on your local computer can re-create the screen on your local system. And this needs to be done on each change and refresh of the display. Hence your computer receives a stream of instructions like "draw line in this color from coordinates x,y to (re.x,re.y), draw rectangle W pixels wide, H pixels high with upper-left corner at (x,y), etc."
Does it make sense? No? And!!! the solution to this is ?
... X2GO? X12? X13?
The protocol provided by SUN/Oracle was embedded within the SunRay-line, and it was called "Sun Global Desktop" (SGD), that uses both lossy compression to reduce the bandwidth requirements and a differential algorithm and caching to reduce the number of back-and-forth information passing that creates the high latency
Excellent, the performance on a remote machine was almost the same as an on a local machine.
But it was a commercial epic failure
Whereas we are all good boys and girls, and on Xmas we still find a new version of the inefficient X11 under the tree; no matter if it's becoming more inefficient year after year.
Looking at alternatives, well ... if SGD is pretty dead and pretty closed-source, RDP is for Microsoft, and there are incompatibilities between WindowsXP and Windows10; but there is also a little-boy called "VNC" that sounds like the only good open source solution, and the main useful thing would be
VNC-like copyrect functionality, where the server says "move this entire region of the screen up five pixels and draw five new lines of pixels under it"
Good, excellent, I like it! It might save the world, the universe, whatever. Thus I am wondering: has anyone already tried to create a hybrid solution for Linux?
'cause it's so nice and pretty, but the truly ideal option would be a custom solution that remotely displays compressed Windows (or a part of their body, e.g. compressed large bitmap from that shitty flash-technology), not the entire display