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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 22 ships an RDP server by default these days. Haven't tried it myself (my manual attempts at running xrdp way back in Ubuntu 18 broke stuff) but it seems to work quite well. Just open the settings application and enable it. Might not even be Ubuntu-specific, might be available in every GNOME distro?

Personally, I've used stuff like Steam in-home streaming and Parsec for remote desktop access. They're more meant for game streaming but they handle normal applications just fine and they run on pretty much any platform I can think of. As an added bonus, there's something nice about the idea of picking up a cheap second hand Steam Link and using it as a thin client for your PC.

Don't know about macOS, though.

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On Ubuntu I used Remmina client to have a remote desktop of another Ubuntu over ssh tunnel. I did it over local WiFi attached to low-speed DSL and a fiber on the remote end.

It's quite usable graphically even with such channel. Of course, running graphically intense programs or remote video would not be practical, but spreadsheets ok.

The RDP protocol should be pretty good even for running video as it can switch to a simple MP4 stream on the fly, at least in Microsoft clients and servers. I don't know if the open source implementations have that capability, though.

I wouldn't expect too much from a DSL link but at a low render resolution (<720p) even video should be doable with the right tweaks. Quality won't be great, but those stupid video ads shouldn't lag out a browser session for example.

If xrdp or equivalent don't support those extensions, I see an opportunity for distro makers there. Linux distributions (and others) have been reliant on VNC for way too long in my opinion and the only somewhat supported alternatives with more than one implementation aren't exactly built for this purpose, sadly.

Wanted to add this also is setup on Fedora workstation 36 and is turned on the same way. It was super easy and works really well. I only use it on a local network now and then though. So I can’t say I’ve hammered on it very hard, but it was exactly what I wanted at the time.

Last I checked it didn't work if your cpu is amd or your resolution is wrong

Well I'm not sure about the resolution part. Mine was nothing notable, maybe 1920x1080, but it seemed okay? Maybe there are other problems though.

I'm running an AMD CPU and that worked fine. Perhaps it's the built in GPU that causes a problem? The system I connected to has a standalone GPU.

I wonder if that RDP server works over Wayland.

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