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…
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'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.
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 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.
How is Chrome remote desktop, and Remmina?
I'd like to link from windows to my Linux computer to develop on idea or 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...
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.