Better than VNC and TeamViewer - NoMachine and the NX protocol
NoMachine and the NX Protocol for Remote Desktop
The NX protocol is essentially a successor to the X protocol and is excellent for remote display and streaming. NoMachine implements this technology, offering a robust, cross-platform alternative to VNC with superior performance and video streaming capabilities. It is also a good alternative to TeamViewer.
A key advantage of NoMachine is its seamless cross-platform support for keyboard and mouse, which is often an issue with many other alternatives to TeamViewer. Despite this, TeamViewer remains my preferred choice for now.
In-depth: The History of NX Technology
In 2001, the compression and transport protocol NX was created to significantly improve the performance of the native X display protocol, making it usable even over slow links, such as a dial-up modem. It encrypted remote connections by wrapping them in SSH sessions.
The NX scheme was derived from the Differential X Protocol Compressor project (DXPC).
- NX 1.x was released to the public on February 14, 2003.
- The final version of ‘NX’ was 3.5, with the last update in 2012.
Up until NX 3.5, the core compression technology was made available to the community under the GNU GPL2 license, while components like the NX Server and NX Client programs were proprietary.
- In 2009, Google released a freely available Open Source GPL2 version of the server called Neatx. Other open-source variants of NoMachine’s NX are also available.
- Starting in 2013, with the release of version 4.0, the NX technology became closed source.