I use ssh a lot (read: constantly) for work. This involves having open vim windows and so forth. What I would prefer is to have a more polished look to these windows, rather than vanilla X11 which doesn't look as nice as, say, a vim window in XFCE, KDE, GNOME, or what have you.
So I am aware of several options.
- VNC: Doable (using ssvnc, since I need to connect via Kerberos), but extremely slow (perhaps due to the encryption? Maybe I just need to tweak the settings, but it was abhorrently slow and regular X forwarding is comparable in speed to running the same program locally)
- Opening a desktop environment on ssh (as in, connect via ssh and run startkde or gnome-session): same problem, way too slow.
My question is, is there some way to get X11 forwarding to pass through my local desktop manager (which is in my case XFCE, as I am running Xubuntu 13.04) so that the windows can look pretty and I'm not constantly reminded of how the 90s looked? Maybe not even through my machine's desktop, but the remote machine runs KDE; could I get it to forward through that, instead of plain X11?