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Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

Just for funsies, I'll throw in the latest remote desktop that I have tried for Linux, the Sunshine server. It uses the Moonlight protocol, so you can use any NVIDIA GameStream client, like I have used Moonlight from f-droid to stream my PC to my Android phone. Clients exist for Windows and Linux too, and a lot of other platforms as well. Sharing the desktop works out of the box, just download the server, run it, very minimal config to set a password, pair it with a client, and then next time, you just need to run the server and connect with the pre-configured client.

It works by converting screen or windows's content to video. It's low latency by design, bandwidth is up to you, and sound also works by default.

https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.limelight/

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Moonlight/Sunshine developer here, having all of these people praising the work done by us is a wonderful thing. We developers work very hard to make Sunshine faster, smoother and more powerful each day. So thank you!

Thanks! It's definitely cool to be able to use my Raspberry Pi (running Kodi with the Moonshine addon) as a "dumb terminal" to stream from my gaming rig from the other side of the house onto my big ass living room TV :).

NO thank you amazing work! I was skeptical until I tried wow, solid and performant from Windows to Mac for hours of gaming.

Thanks so much for building it! My non gaming use case is scientific research, processing massive images and 3D renders coming off microscopes. You need high image quality, low latency, and often accelerated graphics, which VNC etc al are maximally bad at, but sunshine/moonlight let me run the GUI tools I need on a high performance cluster and access it from my laptop.

Thanks so much for all your hard work. Sunshine/Moonlight are _incredible_. I could never get Steam streaming working but S/M just worked flawlessly from the go. The quality is so good that I ended up selling my Steam Deck and playing everything on the desktop streaming to various Apple devices over S/M. Feels like magic.

Sunshine and Moonlight are as close to magic as I've ever felt for incredibly low-latency streaming. I used it a lot early in the pandemic to play games from my PC in a shared space in my home on a low spec laptop while I was sick with COVID.

Later, I tried it while traveling and was shocked at how well it worked over a pretty bad link and a VPN (Wireguard).

These sort of client/server game streaming systems are great modern alternatives to something like RDP. They take advantage of hardware accelerated h264 encoding to get fast video/audio transmission with fast input mapping.

To me these seem like more modern, simpler alternatives to older remote desktop protocols as they are designed around modern hardware and one of the most demanding use cases, gaming. Seems like an easy win to me. RDP does have more features, but they seem mostly for niche/side things.

> RDP does have more features, but they seem mostly for niche/side things.

Being able to copy/paste (including files!) between the host and client is pretty useful though.

This is especially true for Hyper-V VMs without network connectivity. The enhanced session is RDP over a local socket (I think), so copying and pasting files via RDP becomes the best way to move files between your host and VM.

> session is RDP over a local socket (I think)

my understanding is that it's done via shared memory, and if that's right, it's very close to, if not actually, an air gap.

Thats broken in the sdl freerdp client (which is the one they recommend for wayland since they deprecated wlfreerdp). Its go8ng to be annoying for a while until sdl3 comes out and they code that bavk into the sdl client.

And it's just one specific implementation of the RDP channel. You can also share drives and printers, or write your own custom stream virtual channels.

Indeed. To remotely manage or service a computer, RDP is more suited for the purpose.

To manage a remote computer I'd much rather use SSH than any desktop sharing protocol. IMO the CLI over SSH is much better suited to the task.

Unless you really like PowerShell, you probably don't want to be doing this on Windows

Also setting up a good SSH server on Windows is a pain in the ass

For Windows Server 2019 and newer, as well as Windows 10 and 11, Microsoft now provides their own OpenSSH server for Windows, which I found to be pretty easy to set up, personally.

Encode to video is how Chrome Remote Desktop works.

The SunRay ALP protocol and NoMachine are actually the two best I’ve ever seen but have pretty much fallen by the wayside in modern times sadly.

RDP can also do hardware-accelerated encoding: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/10/23/1700 (tl;dr: use xorgxrdp-glamor)

> RDP does have more features, but they seem mostly for niche/side things.

I have seen people whose entire jobs live inside an RDP connection

Why, Sir, I have seen people whose entire jobs live inside this box called a "computer". Peculiar, to say the least.

Proper RDP also does it, and does proper DirectX rendering, provides almost a local like development experience.

Most consultants in regulated industries live in RDP sessions, instead of getting a customer provided laptop.

Currently using sunshine/moonlight to play PC games on my M2 Mac at 4k 60fps and its been very solid cannot tell its remote over gigabit connection at 70 Mbps HVEC from Radeon card. Amazing tech for sure, only way to really game on Mac and can locate PC anywhere in house, right now in garage.

Still use RDP for work though its better suited to lower bandwidth higher latency text editing IMO plus copy paste etc.

How about pushing this stream to an OBS client? I've been looking for a multiple stations to single, local, hub streaming for some time now and other than terrible NDP implementations and RTSP middle man, there seems to be none that can support it all. Meanind low latency, high quality and not filling whole gigabit connection.

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