NT/VMS offers no immediately quantifiable advantage, but rather a different philosophy than Unix where everything-is-a-file-even-when-it-isnt-really. It's more of a batteries included system where the high-level and low-level parts combine to form a coherent whole. The HAL, dynamically loadable drivers, the registry, services, API personalities. It's a shame that all the good stuff about the design of NT takes a backseat to the modern Microsoft shenanigans.
But in NT everything is a handle in much more consistent way than UNIX's everything is a file.
Each handle has security descriptor/ACLs, not only a files, and format is the same. Each handle can be waited for fr with same system call, and you could mix and match file, socket and process handles in same call.
Yeah. NT used to be so fast even through remote desktop, now it is so slow because of the bloat. Also I've read somewhere NT suffers from young developers wanting to rewrite parts in higher level languages, avoiding old winapi. But the Kernel is fast and nice...
A fair amount of my work is done via remote desktop, via VPN even, and it doesn't strike me as a particularly slow. I guess the question is, compared to what? On what hardware and network infrastructure?
I still find NT very fast when using through RDP, especially compared with any FLOSS solution that exist in the GNU/Linux world. I've not tried proprietary graphic remoting solution for GNU/Linux systems though.
Those proprietary just use compression. RDP is genially invented, passing messages/calls efficiently. X also has a ton of messages, but compressing them is not sufficient
