That's a good thing, as it allows the X2Go project to control both the client and the server. X2Go accomplishes everything that NoMachine NX does, except that it doesn't try for compatibility with the NoMachine NX Client there is a separate X2Go client, with Windows, Linux and OS X support.

Many of the underlying libraries are shared by the two products. The X2Go team maintains a lot of the packages used by FreeNX. It wasn't until I was half way through this that I discovered X2Go. I then tried going back to FreeNX, recompiling all the Ubuntu packages from source on a Debian box to rule out version incompatibilities (which was surprisingly difficult). It installed everything in weird locations on my machine and that made me angry. I tried using NoMachine NX Free, the free-of-charge version of NoMachine NX. I spent hours trying anything I could to fix it, to no avail. I could connect, but then it would immediately crash. It's just asking for trouble.) It almost worked. (I suppose that should have been a red flag: never use software compiled for Ubuntu on Debian, or vice versa.

I first tried FreeNX, using Ubuntu packages on Debian. (Although some parts of it are.) Over the years several groups have tried to create an alternative server implementations, striving for compatibility with the NoMachine client software. Unfortunately, NoMachine NX isn't free software.

My own use case was not terribly demanding I want to access the computer on my desk (running Debian) from my laptop on the couch (running OS X), but I figured if NX works over the internet, it'll work even better over my local wireless network, right? And, it runs over SSH, so you don't need to worry about opening up additional ports or encrypting everything. Recently, I found out about NoMachine NX, which has a bunch of really cool technology to make it actually reasonable to use your desktop machine over the internet. Most of the time the connection is too slow to get anything done. I've used various different VNC servers and clients before, but I've never found them to be very useful.

Open nx vs nomachine vs vnc viewer