What follows is a comparison with what people are familiar with: Windows native remote desktop.
Nomachine wins
- Loads of customization options
- Wide support - Works across multiple operating systems, both server and client. Clients on RDP are available for multiple operating systems, but it requires a Windows server (Win10 Pro).
- Simple - Sees other remote desktop capable devices on the network without having to setup static IP addresses (as mentioned in the HOWTO above)
- Compression - Uses a wide variety of compression settings that I expect are more bandwidth-efficient. Note that this is much less compelling over a local network, as described above.
- Audio - loads of settings, including high and low compression for both audio output (speaker) and input (mic)
- Recording - Looks to have a limit in the free version, but works great. Saves to both the NoMachine client interface AND The local desktop. Note that it saves by default to the "NXR" format but it looks like it's really just h.264 (MP4). Runs fine in VLC. Quality of recordings when set to VP8 was blah.
- Higher quality - on the highest settings, it looks dramatically better than Nomachine at the highest settings
- Simple - If you can solve the issues around finding it on the network with the dynamic IP addresses, it's easy and quick.
- Very responsive and transparent - Basically just like using the remote Windows device as your normal machine, with a very slight quality loss from the compression.
- Lightweight - takes up a lot less processor power and RAM. On a 10 year old device, Nomachine took as much as 20% of the processor for the high compression video and 122 megs of RAM.
- Not at all portable. Nomachine requires admin, rebooting after install, and by default uses the system password to connect. The client can be run from a web browser, but that looks like a pro feature.
- Not identical to a local connection. Especially with dark text on a grayish background, you can easily see compression artifacts around the letters.
- Exclusivity - You can't run RDP and Nomachine at the same time.
Nomachine screencap - connection details
I turned up the video and audio quality to try and match RDP. For best quality, I recommend h.264 at 60 FPS. For best responsiveness, I recommend MJPEG even though it looks very poor.
