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I've done this for a long while, and I always come back to the only two viable competitors in the space (that don't require enterprise licensing).

Nomachine and ThinLinc.

Everything else is fine for the occasional remote desktop administration, but they all have a combination of bad video quality, no audio, no keyboard shortcut capture or bad scaling options.



You should really try xorgxrdp. It is now part of most modern distros, has good audio support, and excellent video quality (I can watch YouTube on a Pi running Remmina, using nothing but stock OS packages on both client and server).

One catch is that some distros (like Fedora), for some reason use the Xvnc backend to xrdp by default, which is idiotic. Just go into xrdp.ini and enable the Xorg section (get rid of the Xvnc one) to get things to work properly.

I personally cannot abide NoMachine (it was a spectacular fiddly failure for me many times, especially on Mac and Windows clients) and never found ThinLinc to beat the simplicity of RDP, especially considering the client software (I have very configurable RDP clients like Jump Desktop for iOS and Android that work perfectly with Bluetooth mice and keyboards, so I seldom pack a laptop these days).


Does it work out of the box? multiple screens? doest it work ok with subpar connections, like 4G? Just asking, didn't know about it.

Currentry using Linux Mint, I guess I could try.


Yep. Once you edit the xrdp.ini file to enable the Xorg backend (which I've done recently on Fedora 36 and Ubuntu LTS), you're good.

Multiple screen support depends on your client, I've had no issues with Windows and Mac clients. Audio depends a lot on your server distro (clients have it all sorted). Fedora uses pipewire, so YMMV.

When using mobile connections I trim it down to 16-bit color and it is perfectly usable, although if you're doing that all the time I'd also remove wallpaper and shadows (I prefer using something like XFCE when doing that - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330).


I had to switch back to Pulseaudio and compile the audio plugin for XRDP myself (that was on Fedora 35).


You're probably right about that. My Fedora container is 36 upgraded from 35, so I might have done that a while back and never looked back.


Looks good, I'll try, thanks.


I happen to agree with NoMachine, specially because it actually supports transporting X rendering commands, which is still miles better than transferring video (and you can have e.g. 8K resolutions without requiring a server farm for encoding).

I also like that they allow rootless mode (i.e. without the desktop), which can of solves the problem of "local browser, remote desktop" that TFA is complaining about. Local windows are practically indistinguishable from remote ones.

Many of this also applies to X2Go/FreeNX, albeit it seems to be a bit more regression-prone.




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