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VNC just feels sluggish and inefficient, and occasionally has display glitches. On windows, I can use Remote Desktop (RDP / MSTSC), and on Linux I can use NX Server, both of which are much better performing than VNC.

Is there anything better than VNC server for OS X? Also I need something that has a client (viewer) for Windows machines.

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See superuser.com/questions/10340/… – ghoppe Jul 20 '10 at 17:56
Looks like there's nothing better than VNC...all the answers seem to be crappy web based ones. – davr Jul 21 '10 at 17:58
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3 Answers

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I love Logmein for this as I have access anywhere and I don't need to worry about forwarding ports. Might seem like a bit much if you are only accessing it over a LAN, but still usable.

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Logmein is great! And free! Works with Windows systems too! – Avalanchis Jul 16 '10 at 22:05
How's the performance compare to VNC or RDP? I find VNC to be fairly laggy, as compared to RDP (or NX on linux, but I assume you haven't used that, it's not very common). – davr Jul 18 '10 at 4:35
It's not as good as RDP, but it is useable. On a LAN VNC is better than Logmein, but I don't know your use case. – steve.lippert Jul 19 '10 at 13:06
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up vote 1 down vote

Try this one and all your worries would be gone ;)

The only drawback is that on free licenses it limits your connection time if you use it too much. I don't have this problem because we have a premium license. You can use it on cross platforms (with feature limitations of course).

Teamviewer

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up vote 1 down vote

An old SuperUser thread pointed me towards the $80 iRapp, which seems to work rather well but is rather expensive (well, not by Mac users' standards, but...). It's an RDP server for Mac OS.

The reason VNC is so slow is because it does little more than stream a screencast of your desktop and forward mouse and keyboard commands. RDP and NX both send instructions on how to render the display (kinda like SVG vs. JPG--JPG is, in fact the format that VNC uses to send the screenshots). I think TeamViewer does the same process, though I don't know for sure.

Summary: VNC is systematically inferior, and iRapp is a rather expensive solution to your problem.

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