How To: Desktop as Server, Laptop as "Thin Client"?

Solution 1:

VNC is a bit of a brute force approach to doing remote desktop - the generic implementation simply sends you the image on the screen at the moment, and your system just displays that. Its why its so darned portable but sucks for most part.

I've personally have had great luck with chrome remote as a remote desktop client - its dead simple, and has crazy good performance over WAN. Turn off aero, and other than sound, its nearly native, with almost no connection configuration. You would however find that if the client has a lower res than the host, the image quality/scaling isn't aways very good, and this is made worse if you end up needing to letter box.

If the server is a linux box, i've had good luck with freenx/nx versions, though development on freenx seems to have stagnated. Its probably the fastest remote desktop I've used so far, up until chrome remote. You can use the official client from nomachine with any of the common in distro varients that are available

With RDP, you may need to get a suitable client (there's newer clients for say windows XP that supports the new shiny vista and 7 RDP stuff), and with newer versions of windows, rather counter intuitively leaving graphical speedup related stuff on is good. Its also faster than RDP since it sends instructions on rendering, rather than bitmaps of the screen.

And of course, there's always the option not to export the gui, and do everything over ssh or mosh - which would mean almost no overhead, and looking really cool ;p.