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I'm so glad that the FreeRDP client on Linux works really well. It's one of the pieces of software that made transitioning away from Windows much more convenien

I'm so glad that the FreeRDP client on Linux works really well. It's one of the pieces of software that made transitioning away from Windows much more convenient as I continue to work with Windows systems and sometimes, tools. The RDP server is one thing I miss from Windows though. On Linux I haven't found anything nearly as good. It's really surprising to me too - given that a good visual remoting tool allows for such ease in cross platform living. I suppose there are a lot of reasons for this, but primarily I guess that most Unix natives would consider SSH to be good enough.

dijit 7y ago
Not sure if you're aware, so I apologise if you are: 1) X11 is already a network aware display system, so it wouldn't take too much work to run remote. 2) SSH has built-in X11 forwarding with `ssh -X <host>`, when you run commands they will be rendered locally. On OSX this needs an X11 server (XQuartz) to work properly. 3) There are "better" remote desktop solutions like "parsec"[0] which run on Windows and Linux. They offer much lower latency and higher bit-depth. They're designed for games. (obviously this comes at the price of bandwidth). [0]: https://parsecgaming.com/features/ https://parsecgaming.com/features/
- FullyFunctional 7y ago
  Isn't RDP more akin to VNC than X11? You can connected and reconnect to existing sessions, something you cannot do with X11 (but can with VNC). I have never heard of Parsec before but it's not immediately obvious that it's an alternative to RDP (Desktop usage)
  - paulirwin 7y ago
    As far as connecting to existing sessions goes, yes, RDP is closer to VNC to X11. In that respect only though: you can't also simultaneously use the same session locally unlike with VNC. However, as far as the actual implementation goes, RDP is closer to X11 than VNC. VNC is basically a remote frame buffer, akin to streaming video. This makes it very cross platform friendly, but also IMO feels very slow, even on a local network. RDP is closer to X11 in that it sends display directives (AFAIK, please correct me if I'm wrong) so that it can draw them on the client as they would be drawn on the server. Think sending a "draw button" command rather than sending an image of pixels that are how the button would be rendered. This, combined with compression, helps make RDP feel very fast compared to VNC, and can be used very well even over the internet, unlike X11. I connect to RDP servers in Azure all the time and sometimes forget I'm not working locally, while with VNC you're always aware that it's not as performant. I really wish there was something like RDP as a server for Linux. (OP seems to be a client AFAICT?) Given Microsoft's recent investment in Linux, maybe this will happen soon?
    - vel0city 7y ago
      RDP is definitely closer to the framebuffer style rendering than sending explicit draw commands. Newer versions of the RDP protocol have made this very efficient so it only ends up having to transmit compressed data of the changes per frame, but overall its still more of a video-like stream than true local rendering a la X11.
      - paulirwin 7y ago
        Thanks! I guess I had been misinformed on that. I was also probably thinking of the RemoteFX stuff, like GPU and media redirection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteFX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteFX
        rlkf 7y ago
        No, you are not misinformed. Both RDP and X11 can send both drawing commands and bitmaps. However, as /u/moonchild says, only older programs seems to be sending drawing commands directly. Newer programs want to be fancy and uses toolkits that do their own drawing to have visual effects. (Witness the speed of Emacs vs. editor-du-jour)
        Const-me 7y ago
        > Newer programs want to be fancy and uses toolkits that do their own drawing to have visual effects Good toolkits like WPF and UWP implement their own drawing by utilizing Direct3D. These two are using DX 9.0c and D3D 11.0 respectively, and both are supported in RDP protocol. If you connect to a remote PC and run dxdiag.exe there, you’ll see 3D acceleration is supported, you’ll also see the GPU driver got replaced with completely different one, it’s no longer Intel, Nvidia or AMD, but the one from MS. This has interesting consequences, e.g. all D3D APIs which move data from system RAM or VRAM or back now become network calls, the system RAM is on the server, VRAM is on the client. P.S. Modern web browsers use Direct2D and DirectWrite to render stuff on Windows, there’s D3D 11 underneath, i.e. RDP remote rendering is fully supported for browsers and Electron apps.
      - 7y ago
- loeg 7y ago
  X11 is network aware, in that is theoretically possible to speak the protocol over a network. However, anyone considering it should be aware that it is (1) extremely chatty, (2) extremely synchronous, and (3) extremely latency sensitive. It only works well on fast local networks. SSH certainly doesn't make it any faster. In contrast, RDP and VNC type protocols are screen-replicating designs more suited to higher latency connections. Finally, if you're using RDP, I'd suggest Remmina as an client. It's fantastic.
  - hjkgfdfgh 7y ago
    To pile on against X11 over ssh, forwarding on a modern Linux workstation is spectacularly painful. I recently needed to forward a lightweight gtk app from one workstation to another over 10gbe and a single switch hop. With ssh and X forwarding, my local gnome constantly threw up modal dialogs that the forwarded window was unresponsive, forcing me to keep clicking "Wait" to dismiss the modal, then quickly interact with the forwarded window before the next "unresponsive" modal popped up.
    - inetknght 7y ago
      Forwarding Firefox over X11 _sometimes_ works. Sometimes Firefox on the remote machine will try to join the session of your local firefox -- but fail and then complain that there's Firefox already running. Adding `--new-instance` helps if Firefox is running in a container and X11 socket file is forwarded to the container but it doesn't seem to help if X11 is forwarded over SSH.
      - jabl 7y ago
        Try '-no-remote'. Or was that '--no-remote'? Anyway, that's what I've used for years and years when needing to run firefox over ssh X forwarding.
        inetknght 7y ago
        Firefox is running on the remote, connected to a different X11 session. It is not running on the local. When I use `firefox --new-session --no-remote` on the remote, I see a dialog pop up on my local machine stating Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.
- brimstedt 7y ago
  X11 works remote, but to my knowledge only to start new applications. Connect to an existing session and just "continue where you were" is not easy though there might be unmaintained solutions. If you use ssh forwarding and for some reason gets disconnected, the application dies. I'd love for you to tell me I'm wrong :-) The way rdp works on windows is the only thing where I think windows is superior. Vnc, TeamViewer and similar are not remotely close and they will leave your remote screen open for anyone to see.
  - aksss 7y ago
    Although with teamviewer (maybe others) I think a display driver install can black out the far-end screen.
  - alexhutcheson 7y ago
    Xpra is what you want for this: http://xpra.org/ http://xpra.org/
    - dhd415 7y ago
      I was hopeful that Xpra would provide reconnectable remote sessions for me on my Linux workstations but I found it pretty difficult to configure with poor documentation. If there are any better installation guides out there, I'd appreciate a pointer to them.
- GranPC 7y ago
  Parsec for Linux is only a client; you can't share a Linux desktop using Parsec.
- tssva 7y ago
  Along with better performance and reliability than X11 RDP allows redirection of sound, folders, USB devices, and can present a virtual GPU which allows access to the physical GPU of the remote end.
- makkesk8 7y ago
  parsec does not support multiple monitors which is a deal breaker in many use cases, so far windows rdp is the best free solution for at least windows -> windows remoting.
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
I'm growing to like xpra for remoting graphical applications, especially with the HTML5 client.
yyyk 7y ago
The krdc & xfreerdp combination is terrible. I don't know which program is at fault (probably krdc), but it's not working well at all. There's the occasional random disconnection to right-click rarely leading to disconnection to a case where xfreerdp asks for a password in the terminal but I don't see it in krdc.
- blinkingled 7y ago
  Yep, krdc needs a lot of love - I just use the freerdp command line program and that works great.
- Vogtinator 7y ago
  I've used krdc with rdp to connect to windows clients often and always without any issues. Maybe it's a regression introduced only recently?
  - yyyk 7y ago
    The first & last are definitely long standing. The second is rare, but I think it got worse recently. All of these are frequent enough to annoy, but not frequent enough to make the combination useless, since I can reconnect. I will be giving remmina a shot to see if it improves things, though I'd have rather used a Qt-based client as to match KDE better.
jchw 7y ago
Options for Wayland are a bit less antiquated. Here’s a couple. If you are ever using a wlroots based Wayland compositor, then wayvnc becomes an option for RDP. (Note: haven’t personally used this.) https://github.com/any1/wayvnc https://github.com/any1/wayvnc Waypipe offers network transparency to Wayland, where by you can run applications across the network. I believe this should work with roughly any compositor. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/
- techntoke 7y ago
  There was an RDP backed in wlroots, but it was recently removed in favor of wayvnc. My guess is that it works as well as RDP. You can still connect to other RDP instances just fine using FreeRDP.
  - nwmcsween 7y ago
    RFB isn't RDP
- nycticorax 7y ago
  The bottom of the Waypipe README says: "This is usable, but still somewhat unstable right now".
cpach 7y ago
When I used X2go a couple of years ago I found it to work quite well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2Go https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2Go
rlkf 7y ago
I find X2Go to be a very nice Linux remote desktop solution, more or less on par with MS-RDP on Windows. The only thing I couldn't get to work was continuing a local session remotely (disconnecting and later reconnecting to a remote session works fine). It is packaged in most mainline distributions.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- stinos 7y ago
  more or less on par with MS-RDP on Windows That's surprising. I tried X2Go a couple of times on multiple machines (always logging in from Windows to Unbuntu 18.04 if that matters, on a local network) and it was horrible. At least a crash a day, couldn't get numeric keypad keys to work, slow. Not sure if I did anything wrong or just had bad luck.. And those are just the basic features. To get on par with RDP it should also do multiple screens properly (i.e. not one big screen, it's not 2000 anymore), drive/audio/... sharing and so on. But I never got to trying that, went back to VNC. Which also has problems but at least it allows me to do work. Unfortunately the OP is about right (in my experience, for the things I do): if the connection allows it remote desktop should really be like you're sitting in front of the physical machine. RDP does that for me, on the same level SSH/Mosh does that for terminal stuff. I'm not sure what is so hard to get right to also get something equivalent on Linux, so maybe it's really the lack of interest?
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
    > That's surprising. Same experience. None of the Linux alternatives are on the same planet as RDP. > I'm not sure what is so hard to get right to also get something equivalent on Linux, so maybe it's really the lack of interest? As far as I can see it's lack of interest made worse by the usual fragmentation of effort. Which makes me sad. I really enjoy KDE Neon on my secondary PC, but the lack of a viable remote desktop solution means it'll stay there.
    - stuaxo 7y ago
dekhn 7y ago
I run xrdp on Ubuntu and connect to it from a windows machine using the Remote Desktop client. It has some restrictions- and setup issues (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/xrdp https://help.ubuntu.com/community/xrdp) but I use it daily to drive a remote CNC machine's host.
- _coveredInBees 7y ago
  Have you gotten it working with just those steps? Every single tutorial we have tried on our work machines have resulted in failure with Ubuntu 18.04. I can usually get to a login prompt but then logging in just gives me a black screen, or other times the login is always rejected. VNC works, but is so painfully antiquated in comparison to RDP. It guzzles way too much bandwidth even if all you have is a blinking cursor on screen. I really wish there was a solid RDP server for Ubuntu. I'm quite surprised at the state of things on this front.
  - sandreas 7y ago
    I recently found a script, that fixed my issues: https://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=14093 https://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=14093
    - _coveredInBees 7y ago
      Thanks for the link!
  - dekhn 7y ago
    Yes, I have gotten it working with those steps. If you get the black screen I think that means somebody is logged into the console (the hardware X session). That's the big caveat (I used to use x11vnc, which let you vnc into the system's hardware X session then disconnect, and use the console directly).
    - _coveredInBees 7y ago
      Thanks. Do you know if you can have a vnc server running in tandem with xrdp? I'm not a big fan of the limitation of only one active session being allowed with xrdp as we do a lot of remote work on our Ubuntu boxes and VNC has been foolproof on that front. Being locked out of my box over the weekend (or during this extended stay at home period) because something got messed up with user sessions would be very annoying/limiting. With an active VNC session, I supposed I could use that as a fallback to ensure that I logout of the local session to ensure continuing connectivity with RDP.
chajath 7y ago
Chrome Remote Desktop is a pretty performant and hassle-free option
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
vinzf 7y ago
There is actually an awesome RDP server (called ogon project) based on FreeRDP available: https://github.com/ogon-project/ogon https://github.com/ogon-project/ogon
- sandreas 7y ago
  Looks interesting... thank you. Are you using it in production?
  - vinzf 7y ago
    yes! for a customer with many hundred stores in eastern europe. each office has a pc linux server running ogon which is serving their x11 based ERP software via RDP to up to 20 rdp clients (mobile handhelds and stationary thin clients)
rcxdude 7y ago
There's a mess of different VNC implementations with wildly varying speed and quality. TurboVNC is probably the best one I've found, it feels pretty similar to RDP in terms of performance (even without setting up their 3d acceleration stuff).
- hedora 7y ago
  I had slightly better luck with tigervnc a few years back. (TurboVNC was a close #2 if I remember right.) It was able to play full screen youtube on a RPi 3 over local wifi. :-)
azalemeth 7y ago
Although proprietary, I find Thinlinc Just Works and the server is free for less than 6 simultaneous connections and supports opengl natively in applications (and is based on TurboVNC iirc). It's very much a drop-in replacement. Clients are on all OSes. They give money upstream.
- didibus 7y ago
  Highly recommend ThinLinc, it's simply the best in class. I don't know why it isn't more widely known.
  - stragies 7y ago
    I think, it's not known well in the space, because the target audience is either interested in "comes from Microsoft, with support", "i want an audit-able solution, shared-source, or open-source", "is installable through my normal package sources", "something i can build/setup/cluster/manage myself". Thinlinc (iiuc) is none of those. Please correct me, if my info is inaccurate/outdated.
    - didibus 7y ago
      Hum, well it doesn't come from Microsoft but I believe it has paid support, and it is auditable, like you can setup access logs and all that, and it has an admin interface and can be self hosted managed with an admin interface and all that jazz. You can setup a cluster of them as well, I think their main business are schools and such. Though yes, it is closed source (for the most part, since it uses TigerVNC under the hood and ssh I think, so it's partially open source in that sense). And ya you need to install it with their installer. But I just use it for personal remote desktop, I have a cloud instance and I remote to it for my dev work, while my laptop runs windows. I find it's better than say trying to use WSL.
eikenberry 7y ago
I'd guess most Unix natives consider SSH to be superior to RDP. SSH give you shell access which is a better interface for working with remote systems than a GUI.
cheez 7y ago
x11vnc is what I use
toohotatopic 7y ago
What do you need and expect? I have never needed more than VNC offers, but I also don't play games on a remote computer or view videos over that connection.
- biot 7y ago
  RDP is more suited to text as it renders the screen pixel perfect. VNC, on the other hand, converts the screen into a lossy compressed video stream which is why it’s often slow and fuzzy until the image stabilizes. Night and day difference.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  A number of reasons actually. If you're trying to create a multi-user VNC environment on a remote server the displays do not always render correctly certain applications particularly those requiring 3D components. It can be quite frustrating. Moreover not all keyboard keys are recognized in certain applications. The single user version of VNC, i.e. classic VNC, works well, however it does actually show your remote session on the server computer screen and yes, as best I can tell, the server must have a monitor. I've had about enough of the compromises I've had to make to make my remote VNC sessions work and mostly have opted to run virtual instances of Linux on my local desktop then SSHFD mount a drive remotely but this is such a pain or can be especially in some applications some research applications which can vary results depending on operating system version and kernel libraries. I never experienced these issues with Windows remote desktop and this is very frustrating as a Linux user.
yokohummer7 7y ago
It's strange nobody mentioned NX (NoMachine). When I tried it ~10 years ago, it was much faster than VNC, nearly identical to RDP. Why isn't it more popular?
- zerkten 7y ago
  When I tried it last year it was a pretty horrible experience because it installed client and server on Windows and macOS when I just wanted the client. I had to go in and kill some services for the server part. Having to do stuff like that for security reasons is a bit of a turn off. The actual performance of NX was good, so I'll give them that. I think other people having licencing concerns, but I'm fine with it.
  - JorgeGT 7y ago
    Nowadays there is a free enterprise client that does not install a server nor does it require admin rights. For me it works quite good, close to RDP.
  - stuaxo 7y ago
    Sometimes I've weird experiences with OSX as the server but in general its fairly good (miles better than VNC at least)
- rlkf 7y ago
  NX was fine in the 3.5.x series, but the client is wonkish from 4.x (and out?). X2Go is based on the same (open-source) underlaying library, and seems to be better. At least in my opinion, and maybe in others here too since nobody apparently mention NX anymore.
- didibus 7y ago
  Even better than NX is ThinLinc, much more reliable, faster connections and handle dynamic resolution resizing.
u801e 7y ago
> On Linux I haven't found anything nearly as good. It's really surprising to me too - given that a good visual remoting tool allows for such ease in cross platform living. Have you tried xpra[1]? I haven't tried forwarding the entire desktop, but I have done multiple individual applications with sharing enabled. There are some issues with different resolutions between the host and guest machine, but it works relatively well. [1] https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/
nineteen999 7y ago
> On Linux I haven't found anything nearly as good. Xrdp on the server side works pretty well for us once you get it set up correctly.
- SaltySolomon 7y ago
  Idk, I set up one last week and no matter the tunning I did it didn't work at all, like screen tearing and extermly low frame rates.
  - nineteen999 7y ago
    Weird, we don't get that at all. Are you using the Xrdp backend or the Xvnc backend?
Bnshsysjab 7y ago
I generally use X11 forwarding over ssh provided I trust the host system.
- willis936 7y ago
  This is my go-to on a multi-user system. Otherwise, VNC is good.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  Consider Xnest for untrusted hosts
didibus 7y ago
Use this one: https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/download https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/download I tried them all, and this one is awesome! It is actually better then Windows RDP. Fast, reliable, secure, and can handle all resolutions and allow you to dynamically resize the screen share. Seriously! Free to use for small user groups and home users for free, with a maximum of 5 concurrent users. Thank me later ;)
Bnshsysjab 7y ago
Weird question, how do sysadmins normally administer windows? Rdp? Psexec? Something else?
- SaltySolomon 7y ago
  Mostly RDP, many things (still) require a GUI, and Windows Server Core is something relativly new and has some issues because not everything is exposed to shell.
itprofessional4 7y ago
XRDP (http://xrdp.org/ http://xrdp.org/) seems to be a good alternative. It works really well for us for our cloud VMs.

dijit 7y ago

Not sure if you're aware, so I apologise if you are: 1) X11 is already a network aware display system, so it wouldn't take too much work to run remote. 2) SSH has built-in X11 forwarding with `ssh -X <host>`, when you run commands they will be rendered locally. On OSX this needs an X11 server (XQuartz) to work properly. 3) There are "better" remote desktop solutions like "parsec"[0] which run on Windows and Linux. They offer much lower latency and higher bit-depth. They're designed for games. (obviously this comes at the price of bandwidth). [0]: https://parsecgaming.com/features/ https://parsecgaming.com/features/

FullyFunctional 7y ago
Isn't RDP more akin to VNC than X11? You can connected and reconnect to existing sessions, something you cannot do with X11 (but can with VNC). I have never heard of Parsec before but it's not immediately obvious that it's an alternative to RDP (Desktop usage)
- paulirwin 7y ago
  As far as connecting to existing sessions goes, yes, RDP is closer to VNC to X11. In that respect only though: you can't also simultaneously use the same session locally unlike with VNC. However, as far as the actual implementation goes, RDP is closer to X11 than VNC. VNC is basically a remote frame buffer, akin to streaming video. This makes it very cross platform friendly, but also IMO feels very slow, even on a local network. RDP is closer to X11 in that it sends display directives (AFAIK, please correct me if I'm wrong) so that it can draw them on the client as they would be drawn on the server. Think sending a "draw button" command rather than sending an image of pixels that are how the button would be rendered. This, combined with compression, helps make RDP feel very fast compared to VNC, and can be used very well even over the internet, unlike X11. I connect to RDP servers in Azure all the time and sometimes forget I'm not working locally, while with VNC you're always aware that it's not as performant. I really wish there was something like RDP as a server for Linux. (OP seems to be a client AFAICT?) Given Microsoft's recent investment in Linux, maybe this will happen soon?
  - vel0city 7y ago
    RDP is definitely closer to the framebuffer style rendering than sending explicit draw commands. Newer versions of the RDP protocol have made this very efficient so it only ends up having to transmit compressed data of the changes per frame, but overall its still more of a video-like stream than true local rendering a la X11.
    - paulirwin 7y ago
      Thanks! I guess I had been misinformed on that. I was also probably thinking of the RemoteFX stuff, like GPU and media redirection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteFX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteFX
      - rlkf 7y ago
        No, you are not misinformed. Both RDP and X11 can send both drawing commands and bitmaps. However, as /u/moonchild says, only older programs seems to be sending drawing commands directly. Newer programs want to be fancy and uses toolkits that do their own drawing to have visual effects. (Witness the speed of Emacs vs. editor-du-jour)
        Const-me 7y ago
        > Newer programs want to be fancy and uses toolkits that do their own drawing to have visual effects Good toolkits like WPF and UWP implement their own drawing by utilizing Direct3D. These two are using DX 9.0c and D3D 11.0 respectively, and both are supported in RDP protocol. If you connect to a remote PC and run dxdiag.exe there, you’ll see 3D acceleration is supported, you’ll also see the GPU driver got replaced with completely different one, it’s no longer Intel, Nvidia or AMD, but the one from MS. This has interesting consequences, e.g. all D3D APIs which move data from system RAM or VRAM or back now become network calls, the system RAM is on the server, VRAM is on the client. P.S. Modern web browsers use Direct2D and DirectWrite to render stuff on Windows, there’s D3D 11 underneath, i.e. RDP remote rendering is fully supported for browsers and Electron apps.
    - 7y ago
loeg 7y ago
X11 is network aware, in that is theoretically possible to speak the protocol over a network. However, anyone considering it should be aware that it is (1) extremely chatty, (2) extremely synchronous, and (3) extremely latency sensitive. It only works well on fast local networks. SSH certainly doesn't make it any faster. In contrast, RDP and VNC type protocols are screen-replicating designs more suited to higher latency connections. Finally, if you're using RDP, I'd suggest Remmina as an client. It's fantastic.
- hjkgfdfgh 7y ago
  To pile on against X11 over ssh, forwarding on a modern Linux workstation is spectacularly painful. I recently needed to forward a lightweight gtk app from one workstation to another over 10gbe and a single switch hop. With ssh and X forwarding, my local gnome constantly threw up modal dialogs that the forwarded window was unresponsive, forcing me to keep clicking "Wait" to dismiss the modal, then quickly interact with the forwarded window before the next "unresponsive" modal popped up.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    Forwarding Firefox over X11 _sometimes_ works. Sometimes Firefox on the remote machine will try to join the session of your local firefox -- but fail and then complain that there's Firefox already running. Adding `--new-instance` helps if Firefox is running in a container and X11 socket file is forwarded to the container but it doesn't seem to help if X11 is forwarded over SSH.
    - jabl 7y ago
      Try '-no-remote'. Or was that '--no-remote'? Anyway, that's what I've used for years and years when needing to run firefox over ssh X forwarding.
      - inetknght 7y ago
        Firefox is running on the remote, connected to a different X11 session. It is not running on the local. When I use `firefox --new-session --no-remote` on the remote, I see a dialog pop up on my local machine stating Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.
brimstedt 7y ago
X11 works remote, but to my knowledge only to start new applications. Connect to an existing session and just "continue where you were" is not easy though there might be unmaintained solutions. If you use ssh forwarding and for some reason gets disconnected, the application dies. I'd love for you to tell me I'm wrong :-) The way rdp works on windows is the only thing where I think windows is superior. Vnc, TeamViewer and similar are not remotely close and they will leave your remote screen open for anyone to see.
- aksss 7y ago
  Although with teamviewer (maybe others) I think a display driver install can black out the far-end screen.
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  Xpra is what you want for this: http://xpra.org/ http://xpra.org/
  - dhd415 7y ago
    I was hopeful that Xpra would provide reconnectable remote sessions for me on my Linux workstations but I found it pretty difficult to configure with poor documentation. If there are any better installation guides out there, I'd appreciate a pointer to them.
GranPC 7y ago
Parsec for Linux is only a client; you can't share a Linux desktop using Parsec.
tssva 7y ago
Along with better performance and reliability than X11 RDP allows redirection of sound, folders, USB devices, and can present a virtual GPU which allows access to the physical GPU of the remote end.
makkesk8 7y ago
parsec does not support multiple monitors which is a deal breaker in many use cases, so far windows rdp is the best free solution for at least windows -> windows remoting.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

I'm growing to like xpra for remoting graphical applications, especially with the HTML5 client.

yyyk 7y ago

The krdc & xfreerdp combination is terrible. I don't know which program is at fault (probably krdc), but it's not working well at all. There's the occasional random disconnection to right-click rarely leading to disconnection to a case where xfreerdp asks for a password in the terminal but I don't see it in krdc.

blinkingled 7y ago
Yep, krdc needs a lot of love - I just use the freerdp command line program and that works great.
Vogtinator 7y ago
I've used krdc with rdp to connect to windows clients often and always without any issues. Maybe it's a regression introduced only recently?
- yyyk 7y ago
  The first & last are definitely long standing. The second is rare, but I think it got worse recently. All of these are frequent enough to annoy, but not frequent enough to make the combination useless, since I can reconnect. I will be giving remmina a shot to see if it improves things, though I'd have rather used a Qt-based client as to match KDE better.

jchw 7y ago

Options for Wayland are a bit less antiquated. Here’s a couple. If you are ever using a wlroots based Wayland compositor, then wayvnc becomes an option for RDP. (Note: haven’t personally used this.) https://github.com/any1/wayvnc https://github.com/any1/wayvnc Waypipe offers network transparency to Wayland, where by you can run applications across the network. I believe this should work with roughly any compositor. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

techntoke 7y ago
There was an RDP backed in wlroots, but it was recently removed in favor of wayvnc. My guess is that it works as well as RDP. You can still connect to other RDP instances just fine using FreeRDP.
- nwmcsween 7y ago
  RFB isn't RDP
nycticorax 7y ago
The bottom of the Waypipe README says: "This is usable, but still somewhat unstable right now".

cpach 7y ago

When I used X2go a couple of years ago I found it to work quite well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2Go https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2Go

rlkf 7y ago

I find X2Go to be a very nice Linux remote desktop solution, more or less on par with MS-RDP on Windows. The only thing I couldn't get to work was continuing a local session remotely (disconnecting and later reconnecting to a remote session works fine). It is packaged in most mainline distributions.

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stinos 7y ago
more or less on par with MS-RDP on Windows That's surprising. I tried X2Go a couple of times on multiple machines (always logging in from Windows to Unbuntu 18.04 if that matters, on a local network) and it was horrible. At least a crash a day, couldn't get numeric keypad keys to work, slow. Not sure if I did anything wrong or just had bad luck.. And those are just the basic features. To get on par with RDP it should also do multiple screens properly (i.e. not one big screen, it's not 2000 anymore), drive/audio/... sharing and so on. But I never got to trying that, went back to VNC. Which also has problems but at least it allows me to do work. Unfortunately the OP is about right (in my experience, for the things I do): if the connection allows it remote desktop should really be like you're sitting in front of the physical machine. RDP does that for me, on the same level SSH/Mosh does that for terminal stuff. I'm not sure what is so hard to get right to also get something equivalent on Linux, so maybe it's really the lack of interest?
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  > That's surprising. Same experience. None of the Linux alternatives are on the same planet as RDP. > I'm not sure what is so hard to get right to also get something equivalent on Linux, so maybe it's really the lack of interest? As far as I can see it's lack of interest made worse by the usual fragmentation of effort. Which makes me sad. I really enjoy KDE Neon on my secondary PC, but the lack of a viable remote desktop solution means it'll stay there.
  - stuaxo 7y ago

dekhn 7y ago

I run xrdp on Ubuntu and connect to it from a windows machine using the Remote Desktop client. It has some restrictions- and setup issues (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/xrdp https://help.ubuntu.com/community/xrdp) but I use it daily to drive a remote CNC machine's host.

_coveredInBees 7y ago
Have you gotten it working with just those steps? Every single tutorial we have tried on our work machines have resulted in failure with Ubuntu 18.04. I can usually get to a login prompt but then logging in just gives me a black screen, or other times the login is always rejected. VNC works, but is so painfully antiquated in comparison to RDP. It guzzles way too much bandwidth even if all you have is a blinking cursor on screen. I really wish there was a solid RDP server for Ubuntu. I'm quite surprised at the state of things on this front.
- sandreas 7y ago
  I recently found a script, that fixed my issues: https://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=14093 https://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=14093
  - _coveredInBees 7y ago
    Thanks for the link!
- dekhn 7y ago
  Yes, I have gotten it working with those steps. If you get the black screen I think that means somebody is logged into the console (the hardware X session). That's the big caveat (I used to use x11vnc, which let you vnc into the system's hardware X session then disconnect, and use the console directly).
  - _coveredInBees 7y ago
    Thanks. Do you know if you can have a vnc server running in tandem with xrdp? I'm not a big fan of the limitation of only one active session being allowed with xrdp as we do a lot of remote work on our Ubuntu boxes and VNC has been foolproof on that front. Being locked out of my box over the weekend (or during this extended stay at home period) because something got messed up with user sessions would be very annoying/limiting. With an active VNC session, I supposed I could use that as a fallback to ensure that I logout of the local session to ensure continuing connectivity with RDP.

chajath 7y ago

Chrome Remote Desktop is a pretty performant and hassle-free option

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vinzf 7y ago

There is actually an awesome RDP server (called ogon project) based on FreeRDP available: https://github.com/ogon-project/ogon https://github.com/ogon-project/ogon

sandreas 7y ago
Looks interesting... thank you. Are you using it in production?
- vinzf 7y ago
  yes! for a customer with many hundred stores in eastern europe. each office has a pc linux server running ogon which is serving their x11 based ERP software via RDP to up to 20 rdp clients (mobile handhelds and stationary thin clients)

rcxdude 7y ago

There's a mess of different VNC implementations with wildly varying speed and quality. TurboVNC is probably the best one I've found, it feels pretty similar to RDP in terms of performance (even without setting up their 3d acceleration stuff).

hedora 7y ago
I had slightly better luck with tigervnc a few years back. (TurboVNC was a close #2 if I remember right.) It was able to play full screen youtube on a RPi 3 over local wifi. :-)

azalemeth 7y ago

Although proprietary, I find Thinlinc Just Works and the server is free for less than 6 simultaneous connections and supports opengl natively in applications (and is based on TurboVNC iirc). It's very much a drop-in replacement. Clients are on all OSes. They give money upstream.

didibus 7y ago
Highly recommend ThinLinc, it's simply the best in class. I don't know why it isn't more widely known.
- stragies 7y ago
  I think, it's not known well in the space, because the target audience is either interested in "comes from Microsoft, with support", "i want an audit-able solution, shared-source, or open-source", "is installable through my normal package sources", "something i can build/setup/cluster/manage myself". Thinlinc (iiuc) is none of those. Please correct me, if my info is inaccurate/outdated.
  - didibus 7y ago
    Hum, well it doesn't come from Microsoft but I believe it has paid support, and it is auditable, like you can setup access logs and all that, and it has an admin interface and can be self hosted managed with an admin interface and all that jazz. You can setup a cluster of them as well, I think their main business are schools and such. Though yes, it is closed source (for the most part, since it uses TigerVNC under the hood and ssh I think, so it's partially open source in that sense). And ya you need to install it with their installer. But I just use it for personal remote desktop, I have a cloud instance and I remote to it for my dev work, while my laptop runs windows. I find it's better than say trying to use WSL.

eikenberry 7y ago

I'd guess most Unix natives consider SSH to be superior to RDP. SSH give you shell access which is a better interface for working with remote systems than a GUI.

cheez 7y ago

x11vnc is what I use

toohotatopic 7y ago

What do you need and expect? I have never needed more than VNC offers, but I also don't play games on a remote computer or view videos over that connection.

biot 7y ago
RDP is more suited to text as it renders the screen pixel perfect. VNC, on the other hand, converts the screen into a lossy compressed video stream which is why it’s often slow and fuzzy until the image stabilizes. Night and day difference.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
A number of reasons actually. If you're trying to create a multi-user VNC environment on a remote server the displays do not always render correctly certain applications particularly those requiring 3D components. It can be quite frustrating. Moreover not all keyboard keys are recognized in certain applications. The single user version of VNC, i.e. classic VNC, works well, however it does actually show your remote session on the server computer screen and yes, as best I can tell, the server must have a monitor. I've had about enough of the compromises I've had to make to make my remote VNC sessions work and mostly have opted to run virtual instances of Linux on my local desktop then SSHFD mount a drive remotely but this is such a pain or can be especially in some applications some research applications which can vary results depending on operating system version and kernel libraries. I never experienced these issues with Windows remote desktop and this is very frustrating as a Linux user.

yokohummer7 7y ago

It's strange nobody mentioned NX (NoMachine). When I tried it ~10 years ago, it was much faster than VNC, nearly identical to RDP. Why isn't it more popular?

zerkten 7y ago
When I tried it last year it was a pretty horrible experience because it installed client and server on Windows and macOS when I just wanted the client. I had to go in and kill some services for the server part. Having to do stuff like that for security reasons is a bit of a turn off. The actual performance of NX was good, so I'll give them that. I think other people having licencing concerns, but I'm fine with it.
- JorgeGT 7y ago
  Nowadays there is a free enterprise client that does not install a server nor does it require admin rights. For me it works quite good, close to RDP.
- stuaxo 7y ago
  Sometimes I've weird experiences with OSX as the server but in general its fairly good (miles better than VNC at least)
rlkf 7y ago
NX was fine in the 3.5.x series, but the client is wonkish from 4.x (and out?). X2Go is based on the same (open-source) underlaying library, and seems to be better. At least in my opinion, and maybe in others here too since nobody apparently mention NX anymore.
didibus 7y ago
Even better than NX is ThinLinc, much more reliable, faster connections and handle dynamic resolution resizing.

u801e 7y ago

> On Linux I haven't found anything nearly as good. It's really surprising to me too - given that a good visual remoting tool allows for such ease in cross platform living. Have you tried xpra[1]? I haven't tried forwarding the entire desktop, but I have done multiple individual applications with sharing enabled. There are some issues with different resolutions between the host and guest machine, but it works relatively well. [1] https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/

nineteen999 7y ago

> On Linux I haven't found anything nearly as good. Xrdp on the server side works pretty well for us once you get it set up correctly.

SaltySolomon 7y ago
Idk, I set up one last week and no matter the tunning I did it didn't work at all, like screen tearing and extermly low frame rates.
- nineteen999 7y ago
  Weird, we don't get that at all. Are you using the Xrdp backend or the Xvnc backend?

Bnshsysjab 7y ago

I generally use X11 forwarding over ssh provided I trust the host system.

willis936 7y ago
This is my go-to on a multi-user system. Otherwise, VNC is good.
o-__-o 7y ago
Consider Xnest for untrusted hosts

didibus 7y ago

Use this one: https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/download https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/download I tried them all, and this one is awesome! It is actually better then Windows RDP. Fast, reliable, secure, and can handle all resolutions and allow you to dynamically resize the screen share. Seriously! Free to use for small user groups and home users for free, with a maximum of 5 concurrent users. Thank me later ;)

Bnshsysjab 7y ago

Weird question, how do sysadmins normally administer windows? Rdp? Psexec? Something else?

SaltySolomon 7y ago
Mostly RDP, many things (still) require a GUI, and Windows Server Core is something relativly new and has some issues because not everything is exposed to shell.

itprofessional4 7y ago

XRDP (http://xrdp.org/ http://xrdp.org/) seems to be a good alternative. It works really well for us for our cloud VMs.