Remote Desktop replacement

At work I have 5 Linux machines (1 desktop and 4 tiny embedded machines) and a Windows laptop in my office which I need to use.  There are KVM switches which would allow to connect my monitor, keyboard, and mouse to the machines in that large a setup but they're expensive and the cabling would be a nightmare plus I'd be stuck using just one machine at a time.  I tried using Remote Desktop and VNC to access the desktop of another machine remotely but that's cumbersome and it's slow across a VPN.  To be fair, there are situations when Microsoft's Remote Desktop works wonderfully across a VPN.  At my last job I used to use the Mac version of Remote Desktop to access my Windows laptop at work.  Since a Windows machine was the destination, Remote Desktop did a great job of data compression plus it allowed the client machine to arrange windows differently than they were arranged on my Windows laptop at the office.  So my old 27" iMac which has nearly 4k resolution gave me a better viewing setup than I had at work.

Now I use X11 (aka X-Windows) for accessing all the Linux machines I need access to.  Making this work requires a couple pieces of software.

First off, I need an X Server on my Windows laptop.  That is used to display the windows created by the remote Linux machine.  I use VcXsrv, a version of the classic xorg X Server but recompiled under Visual C++.  This recompilation allows it better access to Windows resources and I find it works better than any other X Server I've tried such as xming or cygwin's xwin.  VcXsrv needs to be run on your Windows machine prior to attempting a connection to another machine.

The next thing required is an SSH client which is capable of X11 forwarding.  That allows any programs launched using the SSH client to send their displays back to the client machine.  I use PuTTY, which has been around a long time and which can handle serial and SSH connections.

Once you've run VcXsrv on your Windows machine and then used PuTTY to connect to a Linux machine (taking care to first set the configuration to allow X11 forwarding), launching a remote program and having it display on your client machine is as simple as typing the program's name.  As an example you can try xterm which will create an X11 terminal window.  Just be sure to launch it in the background by appending an ampersand so the program is placed in the background.  Otherwise, your input and output will remain tied up by the program being launched.  The command to launch xterm this way would be "xterm &".