NX - A Revolution In Network Computing?

Anonymous Coward writes "Judging from this interview, it looks like KDE developers have found a new toy to add to their desktop's networking capabilities. They claim to be able to cram a fullscreen KDE session -- KMail for mailing, Konqueror for file management, Mozilla for web browsing and OpenOffice for word processing -- into a 40 KBit/sec modem connection without losing responsiveness for the user experience. At aKademy, the 9 day KDE Community World Summit, a group of core developers started to work on NX/FreeNX integration to help facilitate the "re-invention of the KDE desktop environment" for KDE4. Knoppix-3.6 is the first Linux distribution to ship an integrated FreeNX server (created by Fabian Franz) with the NoMachine NX Client."

Comments

Educate me.

[Limburgher]

Is this on top of a remote X display, or in place of one?

Microsoft had this for years :-)

[melted]

You can do RDP over analog modem and things are pretty darn snappy. And you could do this since Windows NT4 Terminal Server edition. Remote desktop comes stock with NT OSs since Windows 2000.

Re:So...

[Doctor Crumb]

PCAnywhere for linux is called X11. It's been around for years and years, this is just KDE taking advantage of a protocol to speed that up.

Belongs in SSH

[Effugas]

NX really needs to be ported to into OpenSSH as an optional compression module for its X Forwarding component. That way, there's literally nothing more than:

ssh -X user@host ...and if both client and server support NX, things just fly.

--Dan

Re:Kan we say marKeting?

[Eloquence]

Early this year, c't magazine, probably the most respected German computer magazine, published a quite interesting comparison of office suites. They subjected all of them to a test with very large documents with 140 pages of text, 120 graphics and 240 footnotes. MS Word apparently became less and less reliable as more pictures were added - suddenly they could no longer be moved and aligned properly without destroying existing layout. The tester gave up on Word but managed to do it with most of the other suites (including OO). They also found OO to be on the same level as MSO in terms of functionality.

Now, many bad experiences people may have with OO are probably related to importing existing MS documents. Even though the filters are pretty good, they are obviously not perfect, and last I checked macros were ignored entirely. However, that is not a fair comparison -- Microsoft would utterly fail it, as they don't have the most basic OO import filter. And the complexity of this problem is similarly high as the one of emulating the Windows API on Linux - you don't just have to get the file format right, you also have to duplicate Microsoft's way of interpreting it, even if it's buggy and/or inconsistent.

Nevertheless, the developers are always working hard on improving import filters, as it is obviously essential to business migration. OpenOffice 2.0 will have improved filters, and it will also have much better database management with support for databases directly stored in files (as Access does).

OpenOffice is clearly more performance-hungry than MS Office, although in my experience that is mostly the start-up time. I don't anticipate major improvements in this area. If you're looking for a very slim MS Word replacement, KWord or AbiWord are probably projects worth keeping an eye on. TextMaker, a proprietary package, also exists for Linux. And if you're into DTP, Scribus is quite mature already.

Re:Teacher (aka non-commercial Tutor) here.

[misleb]

X was doing it years before Microsoft in a much more modular and flexible way. KDE/NX is improving on that, not imitating Microsoft. Terminal services require you to pull a full desktop from a remote server. X allows one to pull individual single applications that display as if it were running local. WAAAAYYYY better than Terminal Server IMNSO.