I run Guacamole on my home network as an RDP client to my Windows and Linux boxes. It's a fantastic piece of software. It beats VMC widely in terms of speed, and RDP narrowly when used across the internet. I run guacd on my home server and use that to access my interior network from any computer. It's stable, consumes low memory, and works nicely over HTTPS with apache reverse-proxying the Java webapp. A+ amaze your friends type of software. I am a huge guacamole fanboy.
Edit: I used a Linux VM on my home windows box over guacamole from a Chromebook as my primary mobile computer for 6 months. Browsing in Firefox on my remote VM was always faster than browsing the web locally on the Chromebook. If only it worked well on tablets...
I don't suppose[1] it supports RDP 8's new ability to play video on a remote desktop by streaming the media across and decoding it locally (works in the Win/Mac official clients).
I was amazed and dumbfounded the first time a YouTube video played in a remote session with perfectly in-sync audio and video and instant response to mouse clicks and now find it hard to go back...
[1]: Can't test this myself until I get back to a desktop computer (this is from a phone).
RDP8 also supports RDP over UDP which further enhances performance in high-latency scenarios. I'm assuming that is also not factored into that claim either
I kept waiting for the demo video to show any streaming video which they kept avoiding. VNC is ancient by industry standards. While this is convenient and the open license is helpful, there are far more mature remote desktop protocol stacks available commercially. PCoIP, RDP8, ICA/HDX, heck even HP's RGS cam handle streaming video and USB remoting.
In early 2013, guacamole would do video for a little bit, and then get desynchronized from the server. It would be pretty great while it lasted though...
While guacamole doesn't support video encoding and streaming itself, it's still fast enough to watch 480p-sized videos on LAN at 30fps, along with forwarded sound. Tested streaming from a Windows 8 desktop to a Core 2 Linux laptop running Chrome.
Edit: I used a Linux VM on my home windows box over guacamole from a Chromebook as my primary mobile computer for 6 months. Browsing in Firefox on my remote VM was always faster than browsing the web locally on the Chromebook. If only it worked well on tablets...