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Comment by moontear | Hacker News Reader

Setting it up via Docker container is a lot easier than a custom setup.

I really am not a fan of Guacamole. I love the idea and convenience of having everything running in the browser from the client side, but I much prefer a real RDP session (via VPN) than having it in the browser. Why? Keyboard shortcuts! I am soooo much slower because browsers (not guacs fault - but at the same time it is its fault since I would love a native client) can’t catch all keys (e.g. Windows key). ALT-TAB? Yeah you just tabbed away from Guac. Or the new fancy WIN-TAB, no way that gets passed on to Guac. Also the file sharing experience is worse. RDP? Just drag an drop or Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. That doesn’t always work in Guac…

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IIRC you can install the guac site as a PWA in your browser and sometimes the browser then allows more keyboard events to bubble up from the OS to the javascript layer where guac lives. Doesn't fix everything, but it can help.

Advantage to guacamole is you can have a corporate controlled middle man... You might set your server username to root/root, but that's not a problem if you can only get to it by guacamole.. I mean it's not great, but guacamole can face the world and be the castle to defend, not a dozen or hundred maybe-managed servers...

The security is probably better if you enable HTTPS than RDP?

When I use RDP it is always over SSH (port tunnel)

That’s why I said via VPN, but yes of course it’s more secure if you add another layer - I wouldn’t say more secure than SSH or VPN.

Yes. And many corporate and government networks deny list all traffic on ports other than 80/443, so RDP just is not an option in many cases. VDI over HTTPS also means users don't need a separately installed RDP client and can just access the VDI via their browser.

Can easily enable reverse SSH at home through 443 and 80. Log in with RDP just to enable the reverse-SSH and use that for RDP.

The benefit is that you can access other things than RDP with this solution.

Yeah I kinda just stick to ssh tunnel+ssh keys+VNC. Old school :)

Real VNC or other client / server ?

Couldn't Guacamole hijack the keyboard shortcuts?

One of the reasons I hate Wrike is that it hijacks Command-Shift-N (New private window) in Safari.

have you tried fullscreen mode? At least on vscode-server some shortcuts only work on that mode (probably using the browser Fullscreen API?)

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