Xpra: Multi-platform screen and application forwarding system for x11 | Hacker News Reader

Xpra: Multi-platform screen and application forwarding system for x11

xpra.org

111 pointsnateb202215 comments

I do almost all my computing through Xpra these days. Being able to combine windows seamlessly from multiple VMs is a much more usable way to segregate workloads, and Xpra doesn't suffer from the same security (and increasingly compatibility) issues of X forwarding.

Same here. I wish I could do the same with a Windows VM and a remote MacOS host.

Have you heard of any such solutions?

There used to be a hack for getting integrated windows using Remote Desktop, but I can't remember the name of it anymore and Google isn't finding much :( Hopefully someone remembers (and it's still maintained).

Edit: Found it: https://github.com/rdesktop/seamlessrdp. Seems like there are probably more modern solutions now though.

IIRC WinSwitch + xpra could do seamless windows: http://winswitch.org/documentation/faq.html#protocols http://winswitch.org/about/ :

> Window Switch is a tool which allows you to display running applications on other computers than the one you start them on. Once an application has been started via a winswitch server, it can be displayed on other machines running winswitch client, as required.

> You no longer need to save and send documents to move them around, simply move the view of the application to the machine where you need to access it.

Wikipedia/Neatx links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remmina (C) :

> It supports the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), VNC, NX, XDMCP, SPICE, X2Go and SSH protocols and uses FreeRDP as foundation.

But no xpra, for which Neatx has old python 2 scripts.

I had good results using Remmina (https://remmina.org/) for RDP to a Windows host from a Raspberry Pi. The only thing that let it down at the time was a lack of "clean" multi-monitor support. I'm not sure if it's been improved in the year since I last tried, but you could fudge that by creating a single window that was 2x monitors wide.

Have used Xpra for headless automation for many projects. It's incredible and you can even get a full-blown web experience to run through it remotely without much latency.

Can't recommend it enough - it's so solid and no-nonsense!

Can anyone share their workflows and setups of how they use software like this? I have several computers of different kinds mostly local but potentially remote. I’ve never done anything more than ssh/mosh/screen. How do people use these types of screen/app sharing systems?

I used this on a few test machines at one point. It has an optional web interface that is fairly minimal, so you can install it on a remote box, configure HTTPS access, and point your browser to the IP of the box and get a minimal X session (displayed in your browser) with VSCode and a terminal running on the physical resources of the box rather than your client PC. Useful for things like developing remotely using an underpowered Chromebook or sharing environments (with saved state) with other developers. For example, if you were developing a web app, you could create a dev machine in DigitalOcean or Linode and run both the dev environment (web server, database) and the dev tooling (IDE) in a self-contained instance that gets automatic backups and is available for your colleagues to connect to.

I've also heard of it being used as a method to access graphical environments in containers on a localhost. If I remember correctly, it was thought to offer enhanced security by isolating the container from the host's X11 while still allowing the container to display on the host.

XPRA is the GUI equivalent of the 'screen' command and it works pretty well for most tasks that I throw at it.

I love that the Windows XPRA client gives you a task-bar icon for the applications menu of the Linux host that I'm connected to.

We use Xpra extensively with linux as the server and all 3 clients, Linux, MacOS, and Windows, and it works extremely well, even in fairly latency and bandwidth challenged situations, like an LTE link, and also across oceans.

Are there any seamless/floating equivalent systems for server side being MacOS and Windows and client is Linux?

I’ve seen hints somewhere there is a seamless mode hidden in some RDP servers and clients, which perhaps for windows to Linux might work.

How about MacOS? any system, maybe even commercial than can provide seamless windows to a remote Linux client?

On the server side, Windows has RemoteApp to provide seamless remoting of Windows applications. The official configuration tools for it are only available on server editions of Windows, but open-source tools exist to enable it for certain client editions of Windows, such as [1].

The client side of this is built into Microsoft's RDP clients for Windows and macOS; not sure if any of the Linux RDP clients fully support it or not.

(Irrelevant fun fact: this is also how GUI applications work under WSL, using an RDP backend for Wayland and the existing RDP application remoting tools on Windows to provide seamless windowing.)

As for seamless windows with macOS on the server side, I'm not aware of anything doing that on any platform. It'd be really nice to have, though-- so I'm all ears if anyone else knows of anything.

[1] http://www.kimknight.net/remoteapptool

Possibly Parsec can do macOS as server and Linux as client. Somehow I have never heard of it. It’s commercial.

https://support.parsec.app/hc/en-us/articles/4407194154253-F...

You can do windows seamless mode on linux with RDP. Use RemoteApp Tool [0] to create the rdp file and then launch the RDP file with XFreeRDP [1]

As an example here is an screen shot [2] of visual studio running seamlessly in fedora on a sun workstation

[0]: http://www.kimknight.net/remoteapptool [1]: https://www.freerdp.com/ [2]: https://64.media.tumblr.com/966be79d7ba2cedfbdfcf48fed91cfee...

That’s really exciting for me. I can’t wait to try it out. Thank you very much.

If there is a MacOS server that can do seamless to a Linux host then I could potentially put all my world into a single bspwm multi monitor linux desktop.

Edit: Possibly this commercial product could work for accessing MacOS windows from Linux? anyone know? https://support.parsec.app/hc/en-us/articles/4407194154253-F...

And it supports h264 encoding/decoding, which allows higher framerates depending on your CPU/GPU.

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