NX (NoMachine)

The Italian company NoMachine released NX in 2003, after LBX had shown that compression alone didn't help. The trick was a local X server on the remote machine, nxagent, built on Xnest, which programs talked to with no delay. Between it and the user's computer ran a protocol of NX's own through an nxproxy at each end: only the difference from the previous state was sent, images and fonts were cached on disk, and replies the program didn't really care about were answered locally. Traffic often shrank a hundredfold, and a session at 40 kbit/s was workable.

The core libraries were released under the GPL, which produced FreeNX in 2004 and later X2Go, both of which built complete remote desktops on top of them. With NX 4 in 2013 NoMachine moved to a closed protocol of its own that ships images rather than X requests; X2Go carried on with the free version 3 code and is thus the last living branch of the original idea.