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I used to maintain some linux remote desktops at my job for specific workflows of certain employees.

Wow, using xrdp was a complete gong show to manage. The most common bugs were in the assignment of displays on user logon, as well as a crappy, often buggy, login screen (though GUI logins for linux are fascinatingly weird pretty much universally.)

That being said, even in evaluating alternatives there wasn't anything much better. Linux remote desktop managers are just not that great yet.

As much as I hate Windows, I have to tip my hat to Microsoft's and say that their RDP implementation stands more than head and shoulders above any alternative remote desktop implementations I've tried.

Developers these days are getting much better at doing things over the command line. The trend of using GUIs for everything recently appears to be ebbing into a "right tool for the right job" mindset. Which is a very promising trend I've noticed. Hopefully remote workflows are entirely done through emulating terminals over SSH in a few years time :)



If your primary use case is Linux, xpra is very good.

Unlike RDP, xpra defaults to passing over individual windows — it acts as windows manager for it's own Xorg process on server. This can completely side-step the hassle of wrapping and interacting with existing desktop environment, it's login screens etc. Xpra uses unmodified Xorg server from your distribution with xf86-video-dummy driver to achieve this. Mirroring existing Xorg session is also supported (but slower).


How windows rdp manages multiple monitors, and window resizing when you aren’t on a full screen is bananas compared to vnc, the only problem I had is sometimes it d


The resizing/scaling behavior varies widely depending on which of Microsoft’s three RDP clients you were using

(Not kidding)


> That being said, even in evaluating alternatives there wasn't anything much better.

Do you remember what issues were there with NX? I found out pretty much to "just work" and with a really good performance too.


I used NX years ago. Setting it up required fiddling, and it periodically broke. TigerVNC is my current favorite for Linux servers. Cloud gaming is a different world of protocols.




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