Why is remote desktop slow when host monitor is off unless HDMI cable is used? | Hacker News Reader

Why is remote desktop slow when host monitor is off unless HDMI cable is used?

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58 pointsfirebaze30 comments

I've got an old NUC with Intel vPro support which allows out-of-band management including remote desktop, like you'd expect from drac/ilo on a dedicated server. Headless box living in a cupboard, sounded perfect.

It turns out that if the BIOS doesn't detect a monitor connected it puts the graphics card into power saving, so if you remote connect you get a blank screen rendering the whole thing useless. Took a while to work out what was going on too, I assumed firmware or networking issue to start. I also ended up buying a few of these dongles before finding one that actually worked.

I'm guessing this is also due to DisplayPort treating a turned off (or even sleeping) monitor the same as a disconnect, whereas HDMI does not. I'm unsure if software can detect the difference

Perhaps things have improved, but this was enough for me to avoid DP in the past where possible. When I last used it, I'd have to sit through a couple of seconds of "reconnection" every time I came back to my idle machine (I couldn't just disable monitor sleeping since it was a corporately managed Windows machine, and incentivizing me to disable energy saving isn't good anyway)

Not sure if it will help in this particular situation, but this driver has worked great for me when using Sunshine on a VM without a dummy plug: https://github.com/itsmikethetech/Virtual-Display-Driver

Take your risk to use it, it is not signed and verified by Microsoft, and you need to install the test cert to use it. https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/6444#discus...

Kind of ridiculous, no? RDP servers should be able to tell the operating system to render via GPU. That dongle is a blasphemy before the eyes of any true software engineer.

The state of remote desktop is atrocious across every popular platform.. I've been trying to get vnc working with some Debian 12 machines to no avail, after following all the top "guides", I gave up and instead stood in front of the machines with a keyboard.

2024 is not the year of Linux Remote Desktop, of this you can be certain.

> The state of remote desktop is atrocious across every popular platform

Complete lie. OP notwithstanding, RDP is simply amazing tech.

The state of remote desktop on Linux has always been pitiful. "Hurr durr u can pipe X over SSH" yup, you can. Now try to play a video or 3D app and watch the disaster. Both work flawlessly with RDP over the same network btw.

Unless you are running the windows box headless, as per TFA.

I RDP quite often to a headless windows 11 PC (no display connected at all) and I have GP's experience. Everything works perfectly except for random animations on websites. Fortunately, I basically never use the browser when I'm connected remotely.

My local display is 4K and I don't use scaling on either side. This experience is while using both a win 11 client and Remmina/FreeRDP on Linux. The remote machine is running a 10th gen i5 with the iGPU.

I spend a lot of time using RDP over a high latency low bandwidth link. RFP really is very nice. "Modern" websites with animations and fade effects are excruciating over RDP. Productivity software is a joy to use, however.

FWIW I had decent success with Xpra on Linux, and it's still being actively developed, e.g. the HTML5 client is considered stable now: https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/

Agreed. If I need the best performance out of a Remote Desktop, thankfully there is Sunshine⁽¹⁾ and KASM,⁽²⁾ though it requires significant setup beforehand and bugs do crop up on certain desktops + window protocols.

RDP as a regular or quick solution is actually really decent in this respect.

(1) https://app.lizardbyte.dev/Sunshine

(2) https://www.kasmweb.com/community-edition

These are amazing! Thanks for the links

KasmVNC has worked great for me to setup development VMs which require GUI work. Kasm Workspaces is an interesting product which allows you to create disposable desktop sessions. I use it to test software, setup a particular configuration, then throw it away.

RDP may be amazing tech but I can't remote into my Windows 10 Home desktop so I think the statement that the state of remote desktop is atrocious across every popular platform is a correct one.

Pay for 11 pro. RDP is disabled on the home version

Oh I know that.

But I'm talking about the platform as a whole, and due to the fact that windows home does not support RDP that means that the windows platform as a whole is garbage for remote desktop stuff.

I dunno, I use RDP (Remmina) on a daily basis to a remote windows 10 VM and a Windows Server 2019 VM and while I wouldn't want to do anything other than dink around with Outlook and SSMS, it seems pretty good to me. I vastly prefer it over garbage like VNC. Using Tailscale rather than having an open port.

In fact RDP has a few neat tricks up it's sleeve including being able to remote mount a file system and copy files (which Remmina supports). Been doing this for a few years now to support a small operation for somebody. It's not terrible.

To be fair, the state of physical display font/dpi rendering is atrocious on Linux even without the remote/network component so I imagine rdp is also not the best experience.

Gnome supports RDP now.

Also, on pure X, Xpra can do that too.

And, finally: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VirtualGL

Videos and 3D apps are by no means flawless over RDP unless I missed some incredible advancement recently

Like most thing in Windows, the sauce is buried under layers of Registry tweaks and/or Group Policies, but enabling RemoteFX (released with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1) for RDP enables both h.264/h.265 stream compression, and with additional settings changes to enforce usage of the GPU on the desktop session over RDP, you can get solid 3D acceleration. In this video from Wendell @ Level1Techs, he had 31 virtual desktop instances all running with full GPU acceleration, with RDP as the VDI client software. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLK_i-TQ3kQ. As another data point, I had game developers remoting into their workstations during Quarantine, using RDP with full graphics acceleration using the same tweaks.

What the shinier VDI/Remote Desktop solutions like Sunshine+Moonlight, Parsec, Horizon, Citrix do for you is make all of this easier to set up and use. But as far as capability is concerned, RDP is quite powerful and quite capable, assuming you jump through the hoops to set it up right.

Thank you for the insight.

I learned about moonlight after subscribing to geforce now. The fact that a remote server can render and stream a game to my laptop with playable levels of latency seems almost magical to me.

There are some policy/registry tweaks you need to make to force gpu rendering for rdp but it does work.

Yes it can take a bit of playing around with the settings which are very buried to get things to work optimally. I’ve never had to edit the registry for this tho. However by chance I have not had this hdmi/displayport issue since I have multiple monitors and a mix of the two standards.

X is fine as it has been for over thirty years. VNC should have been strangled in the crib.

I had the opposite experience with RDP and Debian 12 / GNOME 45. It marks the release where I can easily tell family how to enable RDP in GNOME from the settings (or do it myself if ssh is available). Next release had even more refinement: https://release.gnome.org/46/#remote-login-with-rdp

'grdctl' managed to be able to configure everything with RDP the gui does. VPNs help to secure the port though. I wonder if your experience hinges on trying to work it out with vnc instead of rdp.

Bump to say that I have also had a much better experience with rdp on Debian 12 using freerdp. The amount of settings I am able to tweak means that my experience is 100% better using Linux connected to a windows machine vs Microsoft rdp to windows. Better scaling, better frame time, better color quality, no audio issues. I am even able to watch a YouTube video or something without noticing the difference most of the time. And this is with 2 1440p screens and 2 1080p screens in multi monitor mode, full resolution, 24bpp. Using windows rdp I get color blocking, audio fuzziness and terrible lag, especially if I try to go multi monitor.

Update: I've been playing around with Xpra, and it's pretty nice. What a pleasant change compared to VNC hell!

https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra

Same for macOS. Have a dummi exactly for that reason

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