Nilesh Kapadia

I tend not to be very impressed with most of the software that comes out of Microsoft. Maybe its my bias for the alternatives, or maybe its because a lot of their software is not particularly good. But in any case, Remote Desktop is the exception to the rule. I am quite impressed with it and find it immensely useful for getting work done.

Although I've felt this way for quite a while, its shining moment for me, was when I was in India on a 10KB/sec (KB = kilobyte) connection (both up and down) and I was still able to connect to my work machine (which is in the U.S.) using Remote Desktop over an encrypted VPN and get work done. Even over this slow connection, the desktop was very responsive for most applications, though there was a few exceptions that were bitmap-heavy for some reason (Adobe PDF Reader 8.0). It was still more responsive than VNC ever is.

They got almost everything correct feature-wise. The screen resizes to whatever you want (though you cannot change it in the middle of a session, you have to reconnect). So if you want to run full-screen it will resize to whatever resolution you are using on the computer you are connecting from. It feels as though you are actually at the remote machine most of the time. Almost all the keyboard controls work correctly (except for Ctrl-Alt-Delete becomes Ctrl-Alt-End), which is especially important to a keyboard heavy user like me who expects all my shortcuts to work. Even sound comes through if you want it to. I don't use these features, but you can print to printers that are local to the machine you are connecting from and also you can mount drives that are on the local machine you are connecting from. Whatever algorithm they use to transmit GUI information is extremely efficient and very rarely lags.

The only thing that I wish it had was automatic desktop resizing like VMWare has. In VMWare when you resize the window, your guest OS's desktop resizes to match whatever you changed the window size too and that includes going to and from full screen mode.

I use Remote Desktop to work from home often. Rather than install all the software I use for work on my home machine and have to constantly keep things in sync, as well as make sure my project files are in sync with what I have on my work machine (not too hard with version control, but sometimes I have uncommitted changes I'm working on), I'd rather just connect to the workstation I use at work and use that. I also use it in meetings when I need to do a demo or do training, that way I'm guaranteed things will work since I am using the same machine I tested things on. There's only one desktop I need to worry about for work. It's also better than having to lug a laptop back and forth (especially since I don't work remotely often enough and its usually unplanned). If I did have a laptop for work I probably would just use it to connect to my workstation via Remote Desktop.

NoMachine NX for Linux is comparable, but I haven't used it in a long time so I can't comment on it specifically. Unfortunately, for OS X, there is nothing that I know of that is comparable, though I have yet to evaluate Timbuktu. Apple really should get a remote desktop solution that can compete with this. Their VNC-based solution just isn't cutting it.