I'd heard a long, long time ago that the performance of Swing applications was awful when running with a remote X server. Well, that was a long time ago, and since then they seem to have fixed it fixed it good. I just tried Netbeans, running on Debian with Cygwin on a different box as the X server, and I cannot tell any noticeable speed different between this and using it locally. None at all. Granted, these two machines are right here in the same office, so the network speed between them is as about as good as it can get, but still, this is impressive compared to the horror stories I'd heard. Belated thanks to Sun for fixing that one.