If you absolutely must use X11 forwarding, use NXclient protocol 4 or later. You can power cycle your thin client, reconnect to the app later and it will be exactly how you left it. Xpra runs your app in a nested X server on the remote host, and then pipes its video and audio back to your thin client using modern audio/video codecs like HEVC/Opus, and it lets you scale the app, set the quality/framerate tradeoffs to achieve good latency and bandwidth.Īlso, if your network isn't 100% reliable, you don't crash the application. You're infinitely better off using Xpra instead. Not only is the UI using orders of magnitude more data, but it's expecting to animate it with a local GPU, which doesn't get forwarded! Today, running modern GTK or KDE apps over a forwarded X session is really not an option. Also, apps were being built to run on servers and have their display on your workstation, so developers were actually considering the X protocol bandwidth. Back then we didn't have huge truecolour bitmaps, 100MB fonts, client-side rendered widgets, etc. This was fine in the 90's when X protocol was lightweight.

Xterm for windows