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Comment by eikenberry | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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