Ask HN: Viable reliable remote desktop for Linux | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Viable reliable remote desktop for Linux

13 pointsp0w3n3d15 comments

Last time I checked (c.a.14 years ago) the RDP was the best protocol available. It was compressing the data and organising it nicely so I could handle remote windows server even on very slow connections. For Linux there was a similar solution from Nomachine available but it was only compressing the bloated X protocol, not behaving as nice as RDP.

I wonder if in this time have any new solutions emerged, which could behave good reliable and not be heavy on bandwidth

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From my experience, RDP is still a solid option, especially for managing Windows servers over slow connections, thanks to its ability to compress and organize data efficiently. That said, other tools have emerged over the years. I use https://www.helpwire.app/ for this purpose. While it’s not as well-known as big name NoMachine, I’ve found it to be quite reliable for remote device control

I believe both Gnome and KDE have native "share my desktop" options (if you have the right packages installed) that will in theory work out of the box even on Wayland. It does not work properly when you're running games (games are just black screens). The nice thing about this is that you can use the local machine to use/continue your session once you're physically present. It also uses your native graphics drivers so your desktop has all the X11, GL and Vulkan extensions available for whatever graphics card is attached to the machine.

TigerVNC is decent and I have used it in the past for cases where there is never a need to have a local session. It has the disadvantage of no native 3D rendering.

Intel AMT (that is not available in every processor, and a lot of people want to see dead) has a remote VNC thing that you can enable and allow you to even browse your BIOS and Grub with it: it covers more cases than any alternative, but it's not a software solution. It's the one I prefer when available.

My Problem with native share my desktop of GNOME in the past was that it did not work after cold boot as long as nobody was logged in. Is that still the case?

TigerVNC felt very laggy compared to xrdp, especially in slower connections.

I also use Intel AMT with meshcommander, but you have to be aware of the security issues (using Intel Management engine) and that you need either a connected display vor a so called dummy plug for it to have remote display working.

The most reliable and consistent thing I've used has been xRDP. It's a hassle to configure on some systems and others It works out of the box.

For me the performance is quite well.

As far as bandwidth goes, I usually just tunnel over SSH to decrease bandwidth.

I've been happy with Open Source Rust Desk https://rustdesk.com/ . You'll have to test it out to see if it meets your requirements.

RDP is still king, but overall the "remote desktop" scene in GNU/Linux is quite grim and lacking.

I have played with xRDP on Fedora 39 though, and I had some very interesting results. My client "machine" was actually an iPad.

I am happy to report that I was able to get audio (from youtube) playing on the remote machine and being reproduced locally through the iPad speakers (bluetooth headset, actually). I was also able to forward microphone from the iPad to the browser running on the remote machine. Virtual disk was also working to move files from the iPad to the remote machine.

I was using the RDP client from Microsoft, so I'd attribute at least 50% of the success to that.

Specifically, I was running RDP to access a VNC (tigervnc) session because I wanted desktop sessions to be persistent across connection losses and I like the idea of a remote desktop being "always there, always on".

It seems however that this whole setup is a bit fragile, as sometime the whole session would hang and restarting the whole desktop was necessary. Here and there I had to set a fixed user id in my configuration file.

I haven't looked into much details but with enough elbow (finger?) grease it should be possible to make it work reliably.

Overall I was satisfied. I connected to my desktop at home from the ipad while on a bus driving across Italy at ~120 Km/hour (on the highway of course) in the middle of nowhere, using a 4G mobile connection, and it worked pretty okay. It was night though so mobile network congestion might have been low at the time.

So overall it's feasible and works well, but care and expertise is needed to make it reliable.

EDIT: to clarify: worked pretty well for normal desktop usage, but video playback (eg: youtube) from the remote machine to the RDP client was essentially trash, don't even bother trying that.

I'm using xrdp for a long time now and did not have many issues with it. The following may be a problem:

- If you are trying to login on the machine AND remotely at the same time, this might be hard to do

- If you are trying to do audio or printing over the wire (play sounds or print remotely), also a pain

- If you need it to look fancy or customize the look and feel of the login window, this also might be hard to do

What I like about it e.g. over GNOME's integrated RDP feature is, (yes, it is really integrated via Wayland) that you can go from power off to successful login without jumping through hoops and it just works. I did not try KRdp[4] for KDE Plasma yet.

There is also an installer script[1], that is able to solve some of the problems, but I would first try to install it manually, because the script does a lot of stuff that is not really needed any more. There is also a stack overflow post about this[2], but it my case, it was just enough to

  apt install xrdp

done. If you are willing to try a "more modern" approach, you could try

  RustDesk [3]

but I never felt the need to try. I also don't know if RustDesk can go from power off to remote login without having a logged in user in the first place. I'm going to try this in the near future.

1: https://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=19917

2: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78074498/how-to-configur...

3: https://rustdesk.com/

4: https://planet.kde.org/arjen-hiemstra-2023-08-08-remote-desk...

I've only found the poor man's option to be satisfactory, i.e. text-mode via ssh.

Some options can work quite well this way. For example, many Emacs modes can run stuff remotely.

VSCode, which I don't like due to its semi-closed nature, can do something quite similar.

Remote Desktop on Ubuntu 24.04 has been a train wreck — I haven’t achieved a single successful Remote Desktop session of any type, even when the machines are literally next to each-other on the same switch.

Ah. It appears that it is not possible to enable “Remote Desktop” on a remotely installed Ubuntu — you have to use the desktop Settings app locally.

This of course is impossible if you don’t have a display attached (a headless install). Or if you have remote access but forgot to enable it before it was deployed somewhere inaccessible…

Sorry for the double comment, but:

If your host machine is in the AWS cloud, nice DCV works very well: https://aws.amazon.com/it/hpc/dcv/

And it's free to use within the AWS cloud (afaik). Outside of that you might have to get a paid license.

Sadly it's my own server. Or happily tbh...

NoMachine. It just works across all three platforms.

How is Chrome remote desktop, and Remmina?

I'd like to link from windows to my Linux computer to develop on idea or similar

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