What were you trying to do with tramp? I’ve used it for coding Common Lisp, together with a remote SLIME session - ie slime-connect - and while I have run into at least 1 limitation with paths, I have a decent enough work around for it. I think the setup was just a matter of setting some customizable variables.
I see. I thought I had some .emacs customized settings I could share, but they're all slime specific. It appears tramp otherwise just works without further configuration - unless I set them in ielm and forgot about them before copying them over to .emacs, but I didn't see anything like that in my ielm history.
It can be a bit heavy in cpu usage depending on plugins though.
I like emacs tramp in theory since it doesn't impose that, but latency suffers.
With correct ssh config it usually works well, but many times I'd prefer lower latency with emacs being on the host.
That's supposedly possible, but I've never gotten it working.