Recommended way to remotely control your Mac Mini from your Macbook Pro at home

Is your Mac Mini Intel-based? If so, then it, along with your MacBook Pro, has gigabit ethernet. My suggestion would be to get some cat 5e or cat 6 cables and a gigabit switch. Still, I personally use Apple's "Screen Sharing" remote desktop client and server built into Mac OS X, and it works fine, and has acceptable performance even over wifi (or remotely through Mobile Me).

I found VNC to be fast enough for all I wanted. What exactly do you want to do on the remote machine?

For a more-remote-than-LAN scenario the points to consider are:

• color depth and encoding: try to use 16-bit color or less and/or "tight" encoding on the client.
• security: you should not use "plain" VNC authentication that sends the password in the clear on the internet. Use either Apples Remote Access authentication or tunnel VNC through SSH (you can set compression on the SSH tunnel).

I regularly use either OSX "Screen Sharing" without VNC password with the OSX Screen Sharing client (Cmd-K vnc://my.host.name) or VNC tunneled through SSH with Vine Server set to localhost-only and Jollys Fast VNC as client.