When I do Windows-to-Windows RDP, the quality is great, it most of the time indistinguishable from local. I don’t know what magic RDP from MS is doing, but I guess they transfer “what to render” and it’s actually my local GPU doing the rendering or something like that. On the other hand on Linux I tried many different RDP clients but it was always transfering raster images like VNC and it looked like crap. Is there some proper RDP client on Linux that can work like RDP on Windows?
Remmina seems to work fine here. I use it sometimes for EC2 boxes that run windows and so on.
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I had a look at this a year or two ago as I was working on an rdp based thin client project, ultimately ended up using windows 10 pro on the thin clients as none of the Linux rdp clients were as good, and were very CPU intensive - the latest rdp protocols send the desktop as an avc444 video stream, which works great if hardware accelerated on a video card but will soon choke a cheap CPU if it is forced to decode in software.
I didn’t find any Linux rdp clients which used GPU acceleration.
Might be worth trying mstsc.exe with wine? Or perhaps the MS android client?
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Remmina worked best for me if I manually selected color depth RemoteFX and client resolution.
I haven’t RDP’ed into Windows in over a year now, besides from my work laptop to a windows VM using MS Remote Desktop client, not mstsc.
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There’s really a couple answers depending (it’s not specific if you’re looking for Linux → Windows RDP or Linux → Linux ).
Remmina is good as a configurable client to connect as an RDP, VNC (or even SPICE) client and for ad hoc I prefer this but xfreerdp (yes, the terminal one) is the one I’ll use if I need to use a session all day - it supports multiple monitors, remmina until I guess somewhat recently did not.
The linux-based thin clients (HP) I arrange also use xfreerdp on the back end.
For linux-to linux remote - I quite like x2goclient/x2goserver . this is the nearest I’ve found performance and behaviour wise to rdp. (compression 16m-png-jpeg or 16m-rdp-compressed I’ve had best results with, 16m-png if you can’t stand any compression artefacts).
it can mirror a console session, though probably not a wayland console. It can howevre spawn it’s own persistent session of e.g. mate etc.
no android/ios direct client, either a problem for you or not.
it's almost as if in the 90's this kind of thing could not be done with xdmcp.
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Remmina. Works for me.
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There are many other remote desktop client for Linux like Anydesk, Temviewear, PuTTY, MobaXterm, Yet i have used them only, but there are many others.
So I had this same question, but searching the forum before making a new thread turned up this thread and I was like, perfect.
I think the last guy is a bot, or they asked an AI that hallucinated. All of those are Windows software, except for Anydesk and maybe TeamViewer. But Anydesk, afaik, does not support RDP. I’ve looked into it before. Also, I like a solution that is LAN-only. I use Wireguard to remote into my PFSense firewall and use its firewall rules to allow me to navigate as if I am a LAN client. Anydesk does some software magic to allow remote access - which means remote sessions are bouncing off of their servers.
They did give me some inspiration. I asked ChatGPT, and it provided to me the following list:
FreeRDP (CLI tool)
KRDC
Vinagre
rdesktop (for Legacy use-cases)
Apache Guacamole
Edit 1: So far, I just tried KRDC as I am a KDE user, and it absolutely works better than Remmina so far.
Update: I just tried xFreeRDP, and it might actually be slightly better than KRDC. Though, I found it easier to set the client’s screen resolution with KRDC.
I also have another question. Wendell has praised RDP servers on Linux before, so does anyone have any knowledge of setting up an RDP server as well?