This is much faster than VNC, but obviously does not allow for control.
We use the network to transport the stream - I'm getting excellent results over wi-fi. You can do much better with Ethernet, with Ethernet I guess you can use VNC. I don't think you can use usb, bt or hdmi to do this.
My first laptop has Arch Linux with xfce, my second one has Gentoo Linux with fluxbox.