A full desktop through a 500 Kbps straw

You're on the train, tethered to one bar of signal, and you need twenty minutes in the desktop. The trick isn't a better connection. It's a different URL:

?encoding=jpeg&quality=40&video=false&bandwidth_limit=500000

JPEG instead of video encoding, quality dialed down, hard cap at 500 Kbps. The desktop gets grainier and stays usable: text is readable, clicks land, the spreadsheet saves. At the hotel that night, you drop the parameters and the same session comes back at full fidelity. Nothing migrated. You changed how it was painted, not where it ran.

Remote desktops historically demanded good networks and degraded into uselessness without them. This one negotiates.