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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

RDP. Simply nothing in the same league on Linux.

I prefer having a beefy workstation at home and connect to it remotely from a cheaper laptop, as I find laptops are noisy and weak unless you spend a sizable fortune.

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What are you comparing it to or what do you feel is missing? Remote desktop has gotten way better on Linux since the days of only X-Forwarding or VNC, at least from a performance perspective.

I tried just about everything a couple of years ago. Various VNC variants, X2Go etc.

They all sucked in terms of speed/performance compared to Windows-to-Windows RDP, and none allowed for starting a new desktop session if user wasn't already logged in, or resuming existing session if present. Both essential to me.

Many lacked some features like clipboard, file transfer, sound. First two are hard requirements as well.

I see things have been moving, so I'm hoping things become viable in a year or three.

why not just use sunshine/moonlight? RDP (and the other junk like X11 forwarding/VNC) has always been too slow for my use-cases. Movies or gaming would bring it to a halt. Meanwhile Moonlight gives me a clean 4k60fps with only ~25ms latency across the country.

Too specific to gaming, and AFAIK NVIDIA-specific. Plus, RDP disconnects the physical console, so the screen stays off and keyboard/mouse can't interfere. There is some software like NX that can blank the screen (actually, make it black or show some silly gradient animation) and inhibit the keyboard/mouse, but the screen stays on; and it's not even by default. Does anybody here know an open-source business-grade remote desktop software for Linux? I'd be really interested to deploy it.

RDP uses h.264 for rapidly updating regions. I've played near-fullscreen YouTube videos over RDP via the internet without realizing I was doing so remotely.

I've also gamed over RDP. It wasn't the best experience, though to be fair I was on an island literally on the opposite side of the globe, and ran the game fullscreen. But I'm sure a dedicated solution like Steam or Sunshine/Moonlight would fare better for such.

Though at least with Steam the console has to be unlocked, which is a problem if I'm away.

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