r/linux • u/LoicAtTimeclock • 14d ago
Development Who else would love proper RDP support in Gnome? It's so close, go give a thumbs up.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop/-/work_items/16•
u/redsteakraw 14d ago
I believe KDE just added RDP to their upcoming release this should make remote desktop easy and near universal on the Linux Desktop.
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u/lolkaseltzer 12d ago
krdp is miles behind GNOME's. It does not "work" in any way that matters.
And GNOME's is still miles behind Windows.
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u/ArchaneChutney 13d ago
Are you referring to krdp? If so, that's already been merged. It has some limitations though. Not all RDP clients will work with it. And it doesn't seamlessly support clients having a different screen resolution from the host. It can only scale the stream of the desktop, it doesn't allow applications to run natively at the screen resolution of the client like Windows RDP allows.
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u/that_boi18 13d ago
It also requires a user to be already logged in and have an actual display plugged in. GDM can start from the login manager and do it headlessly.
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u/_jimmythebear_ 14d ago
I gave up and bought a IP KVM cause I couldn't get anything to work in Linux the way I wanted. Windows like two clicks.. Linux here is a bunch of ways not to do what I want... cheers. Nomachine was what I found... but they all went no free versions anymore so thats gone too.
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u/PestoCalabrese 14d ago
I use nomachine, what non free version?
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u/DonkeyTron42 14d ago
Wayland NoMachine is a security nightmare if your remote PC is not physically secure. It just mirrors your screen and anyone at the physical box can see everything you’re doing as well as just take over the session.
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u/PestoCalabrese 14d ago
Exactly like a kvm
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u/DonkeyTron42 14d ago
I would never use a kvm for my office PC.
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u/PestoCalabrese 14d ago
Then I don't thing remote access is something for you in general. No matter the tool.
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u/kopsis 14d ago
Windows remote desktop locks/blanks the screen on the host while someone is connected remotely. It's completely reasonable to expect the same from the Linux solutions.
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u/DonkeyTron42 13d ago
NoMachine does not blank the screen. I learned this the hard way when my co-worker was messing with me and sat down at my office PC and started adding random mouse movements and keystrokes. After thoroughly pissing me off, he informed me that everyone in the office could see everything I'm doing.
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u/_jimmythebear_ 14d ago
https://www.nomachine.com/what-s-new-in-nomachine
No Machine Personal edition.
Introducing NoMachine Personal Edition
The free version has been retired and in its place there is NoMachine Personal Edition, a fully commercial product for anyone, individuals and businesses, which need reliable remote access without compromise. Priced at just $24.50, it's the most affordable way to stay connected to your machines. That price includes support, so help is always there when you need it. Personal Edition is the smart way to work remotely, wherever you are.
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u/PestoCalabrese 14d ago
I'm still on 9.5.7 and it keeps working fine.
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u/_jimmythebear_ 14d ago
Dont update it, cause Version 10 is when they culled it and they removed the 9 installers.
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u/PestoCalabrese 14d ago
If you neet it: filebin.net/9msqcf9qwlcjvhtu . of course don't trust strangers sharing executables online.
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u/PorousClay 14d ago
In some ways, Wayland was a step backwards.
I get that security and convenience are two opposites on a sliding scale, but some things like a proper remote desktop are non-negotiable.
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u/burning_iceman 14d ago
Obviously there's a temporary step backwards in functionality when replacing a huge ecosystem around one protocol such as X11 with a new one such as Wayland, especially when the new one requires explicit features and standardization that were previously enabled by uncontrollable insecure access. You need to get the software out first to devs and later to users to test but also to be able to even discover and evaluate what else is missing.
By now though the additional required protocols and the standardization has mostly happened and feature parity with X11 is close to being reached.
On the KDE Plasma side, remote desktop support is about to reach that parity too: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/whats-happening-in-kde-remote-desktop-improved-unattended-mode-and-more/
I don't know the current state on Gnome, but no doubt they'll also get around to implementing it properly.
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u/Ontological_Gap 13d ago edited 13d ago
This. It's really painful this time around because there were absolutely no protocols or permissions for anything, everything in your session of the X server was completely readable and writable from anything running as your user.
Wayland is cleaning up decades of horrible tech debt in the unix world.
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u/Indolent_Bard 13d ago
Say what you will about Gnome, but they either implement it properly or never implement it at all. There's no in between.
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u/5haika 14d ago
In a way. They kinda started from scratch instead of taking more and more things onto X
And creating and adapting takes so much fucking time. But I think it's probably worth itI personally think, a reasonable middle-ground would be to allow an app to act as RDP indefinitely
If any app could just RDP without me being prompted at any point, that would be security-hell•
u/Indolent_Bard 13d ago
Obviously, it's pretty negotiable, or else they would have implemented this years ago. Aside from what Valve and volunteers do, nothing in Linux gets done unless it benefits enterprise users. That's what drives the bulk of Linux development.
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u/DHermit 14d ago
Are they? Remote desktop is something that's like used by a tiny fraction of Gnome users.
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u/PorousClay 14d ago
Remote desktop is something that's like used by a tiny fraction of Gnome users.
It's about half of ssh use. That's still pretty significant.
And it's an important feature for an OS to have. No matter how superior ssh is. If Windows users are going to be switching to Linux in the near future, and they have specific needs that require remote desktop, then that's just something that should be available.
Ssh can't cover everything. I used to work in a healthcare job where we needed to rdp to another building and open the healthcare software suite we needed. If a GUI doesn't allow for the same convenience, there's no reason for that company to use it.
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u/DHermit 14d ago
It's about half of ssh use.
Are you sure about that? I severely doubt that.
And it's an important feature for an OS to have.
Why? I doubt that 90% of computer users have a use case for remote desktop or even know that it exists.
I used to work in a healthcare job where we needed to rdp to another building and open the healthcare software suite we needed. If a GUI doesn't allow for the same convenience, there's no reason for that company to use it.
Sure, professional usecases exist, but that doesn't mean that this is the targer group for Gnome.
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u/PorousClay 14d ago
Are you sure about that? I severely doubt that.
It was from one of those gnome-info-collect surveys:
https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2023/01/18/gnome-info-collect-what-we-learned/
Why? I doubt that 90% of computer users have a use case for remote desktop or even know that it exists.
Why do 90% of people need to use something for it to exist? Linux is a toolbox, and it should have a tool for everyone. Even the only-9% of people who use something.
And who is to say that the number is lower because the implementation of the feature sucks?
Sure, professional usecases exist, but that doesn't mean that this is the targer group for Gnome.
There is a native healthcare provider suite for Linux called GNU Health, so the same usecase could easily exist on Linux. So why should Gnome exclude a certain scenario from being possible for professional needs? I'm not aware of any DE using "leave it to another DE to supply that feature" as a talking point. And if it was, that would quickly disqualify that DE from ever getting my recommendation.
You have to remember that Gnome is not a DE for any specific uses. It's general purpose. Even the site gnome.org states "An independent computing platform for everyone".
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u/DHermit 14d ago
That survey looks at which features are enabled, not about what is used.
So why should Gnome exclude a certain scenario from being possible for professional needs?
It's a complex feature, so deciding if it's worth the big effort for a small amount of people is a very typical discussion. In an ideal world, Gnome has infinite resources, but they don't have that.
I'm not aware of any DE using "leave it to another DE to supply that feature" as a talking point.
We are talking about Gnome, which regularly stripped features.
I'm not saying "Gnome shouldn't add RDP". What I'm saying is "I think that RDP is niche enough that it's fine for Gnome to prioritise other things". And if that means that you can't use Gnome for your usecase, fair. That's why choices exist.
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u/PorousClay 14d ago
That survey looks at which features are enabled, not about what is used.
Its the closest thing that exists to show what the numbers are. And relative to ssh, it's about half. If you can find a more accurate number to support that rdp it lower, then feel free to link it.
It's a complex feature, so deciding if it's worth the big effort for a small amount of people is a very typical discussion. In an ideal world, Gnome has infinite resources, but they don't have that.
This is something that already exists on every major desktop OS. Whether you use Windows or MacOS.
I'm not saying "Gnome shouldn't add RDP". What I'm saying is "I think that RDP is niche enough that it's fine for Gnome to prioritise other things".
You should have just led with that, then. So that I can just agree to disagree. Which I do.
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u/DHermit 14d ago
You said that a feature is non negotiable, I disagreed with that. And then the discussion continued further. I couldn't have led with that, because I couldn't know that that's where the discussion will go.
And relative to ssh, it's about half.
Half of desktop SSH things, but absolutely most SSH usage is on servers that don't even have any graphical things installed. If you meant purely desktop SSH usage, then I can see it and it's just miscommunication (is there some proper English idoim for "aneinander vorbeireden"/"talking to the side of eachother"?).
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u/Usually-Mistaken 13d ago
Ich würde "talking PAST each other" sagen.
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u/DHermit 13d ago
Ah, das wars, danke! Irgendwas lag mir auf der Zunge (und ja, ich hätte einfach googlen können...).
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u/archontwo 13d ago
Wayland has had an Rdp backend for 13 years. It is up to DE developers to implement it the way they want to.
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u/mitsosseundscharf 14d ago
As a (non-Gnome) developer please don't. Social media invades of developing platforms are non-helpful in the best case and an annoyance or worse in the regular case.
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u/LoicAtTimeclock 13d ago
Look at how long that issue has been open. Sometimes you just have to give some positive encouragement.
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u/Zettinator 14d ago
You can already enable headless remote desktop. Isn't that good enough?
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u/ArchaneChutney 13d ago
It's not the same thing at all.
Suppose that you have a local session on a machine with a monitor. Then suppose that you would like to continue that same session remotely. Windows RDP let's you do it seamlessly without any setup.
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u/Ordinary-Lifeguard47 14d ago edited 13d ago
XFCE + X + XRDP just works.
The Gnome RDP support is just super weird and entirely unuseable.
Why does it need double authentification? Why can it not against the system directly?
Why cannot be switched on for all users on a system easily?
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u/gtrash81 13d ago
Don't know why, but this issue should be closed.
Why?
Because g-r-d headless had been added in Gnome47 iirc.
The setup is a bit confusing, but it works:
https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/10/html/administering_rhel_by_using_the_gnome_desktop_environment/remotely-accessing-the-desktop#connecting-to-a-remote-desktop-session-on-a-headless-server-for-multiple-users
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u/WIldefyr 13d ago
Yeah I was so confused by this post. Been using it for some work machines now and I’ve actually had more problems getting a decent Linux client than having RDP working. The gnome setup for RDP is an absolute pain to do though, probably one of the worst setup exp I’ve ever had - thankfully I did write an ansible playbook to do it reproducibly.
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u/hanzzen 14d ago
We use gnome remote desktop at work, sort of. We use hyperv vms on our workstations (dont ask why its not running, Linux, i dont know why) so enhanced session support is required. Gnome remote desktop does not support that but we have a work around with freerdp-proxy. Literal man in the middle but it works.
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u/TheBendit 14d ago
It is unclear whether you mean client side or server side. Server side works amazingly in Fedora 44. Even headless and multiuser. It is a total game changer.
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u/LoicAtTimeclock 13d ago
Server side, if I want to login to my existing session from home to continue working remotely I simply cannot.
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u/TheBendit 13d ago
You need pretty much the latest everything for it to work. For me, it started working somewhat around Fedora 41. It only became reliable when Fedora 44 was released with Gnome 50.
Now it just works every time and performance is excellent.
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u/nukem996 14d ago
It's hilarious we got rid of X and now are trying to reimplements one of its core features XDMCP. It worked significantly better than RDP since it streamed X server commands, not images. So rendering 2D, 3D, and video acceleration were done client side.
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u/Ontological_Gap 13d ago
Maybe back in the 80s, X hasn't worked that way in a long time. It's actually much worse than just sending an image steam on modern systems and applications
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u/nukem996 13d ago
I had XDMCP working perfectly around 2008. Pulseaudio paired very well, I had it automatically connect when the X session started. It performed significantly better than RDP or Citrix especially when watching videos.
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u/Ontological_Gap 13d ago
You were using raw XDMCP and not ssh forwarding? This was a very bad idea even back then.
Are you sure you were sending the raw command steam? That's around the time applications started doing their own rendering and just sending images instead. Hell, people would even use tools like X2Go or Xpra to force this behavior because it is so much better
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u/pioni 13d ago
This is my favourite weak link with Linux right now. Just about everything else I can get working, but RDP on bare metal and virtualised hosts simply never works. The old Pop!OS had it working at some point, but I really would like to see this feature working out of the box on Gnome (on Debian) every time.
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u/Sibexico 13d ago
I'm not sure if I used RDP after Windows XP... Using VNC and completely satisfied with it.
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u/TCB13sQuotes 13d ago
I would be happy with just a native version of WinSCP… and probably a OSK that made sense.
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u/cyphax55 10d ago
If you mean that you want to connect to a remote filesystem through ssh, you can do this in the file browsers of Gnome and KDE already by typing sftp://hostname in the location bar. If you have setup ssh keys for passwordless login it won't even ask for a password. :)
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u/TCB13sQuotes 10d ago
That's just not the same thing. You can't simply trust that UI not to mess up the remote filesystem, add temporary files and other garbage. Besides WinSCP is 10x faster.
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u/oliver-bestmann 13d ago
I am currently working on patching in an rdp backend into mutter that is optimized to run under wsl2. Hacked the d3d12 driver to support dmabuf sharing, so applications can share their render target directly with mutter. The only the composited result is read back into cpu memory shared with the host. A patched freerdp client then renders then to the screen. I get 60fps on a 10 year old thinkpad at 2560px width. I am targeting 120fps in a 4k screen.
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u/xc82xb5qxwhhzeyt 14d ago
Doesn't XRDP already work?
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u/getbusyliving_ 14d ago
People like me need RDP for work
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u/xc82xb5qxwhhzeyt 14d ago
Isn't xrdp just an implementation? I connect to my XRDP server just like I connect to Windows machines
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u/getbusyliving_ 14d ago
Yes but depends what you're doing. I'd be in a very niche 0.0001% of Linux use cases. I log into a remote Windows PC (1000kms away) over Wireguard and work 8-12 hours a day (Architecture, as in buildings not IT). I need a min of dual screens and GPU acceleration. The only way I can do it under Linux (and Wayland) that is fast, reliable and performs perfectly is via Thincast (Flatpak)...which, yes, does use XRDP and yes, is not open source. I don't want to log in via the cmd line with flags galore. Thincast provides me with an almost 100% replication of the Windows native RDP client. Doing this means I no longer need a Windows PC, or a Mac, outside of work.
Noting that on my Laptop I use Remmina because it works better with the lower spec Quadro card than Thincast. The problem with Remmina; no dual screens under Wayland and sketchy at best under X11.
And, yeah, I've tried every method and every app....I can hear the whataboutisms rolling around in your brain 🙃 Nothing compares to the setups above apart from the Native Windows RDP client and the MS app on MacOS. For me, Linux and RDP is almost on par with those two platforms.
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u/spyingwind 13d ago
I used Thincast as well in a past job. Was the only RDP client that could connect to the work windows 11 laptop successfully.
I just hope the next job lets me run linux.
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u/computer-machine 14d ago
Does not wanting anything to do with Gnome or RDP cancel each other out like a double negative?
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u/ketralnis 14d ago edited 14d ago
It’s a volunteer project. Sure I guess you can ask people to donate their time to something you want instead of something they want, but it doesn’t seem an effective mechanism. And asking other people to invade to vote for the thing that you want is impolite at best.
In any case it’ll get built when somebody builds it. Be the change you want to see in the world. In the mean time they don’t owe you anything.
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u/monkeyboy107 14d ago
Why would I want rdp? All the configs I need to change cns be done via ssh
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u/PorousClay 14d ago
What if you are a healthcare worker, and you need to chart something over rdp because your hospital or whatever decided to try Linux instead of keep using Windows?
You think healthcare workers in that scenario should be using ssh?
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u/AndreaCicca 13d ago
Same reason why people use a desktop environment and don't just use a terminal
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u/ScratchHistorical507 14d ago
Why tho when there are already enough remote desktop implementations? Especially when you already have RustDesk. And RustDesk has just put out a test version for precisely this feature. So why bother wasting resources of Gnome devs for that when a DE-agnostic implementation is already closing in on the finish line?
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u/d_ed KDE Dev 14d ago
I don't think rustdesk does have this feature.
It'd need tight mutter integration it can't be done externally.
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u/ScratchHistorical507 13d ago
I don't think rustdesk does have this feature.
Please read what I actually wrote.
And RustDesk has just put out a test version
https://x.com/rustdesk/status/2087945266855026744 (not aware of a different link to this).
It'd need tight mutter integration it can't be done externally.
At least that's what you claim, but this seems to beg to differ.
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u/d_ed KDE Dev 13d ago
We're talking about different things under the same name.
They're talking about logging in via a a display manager. It's still a relevant important step - and one gnome-remote-desktop does already.
The OP in this post is talking about when you log into an existing session that's running on a host. The host goes back to the login manager, but the client streams the main desktop.
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u/ScratchHistorical507 13d ago
A feature that should not exist. When the session is already logged in on the remote system, the only way to remote into that very session should be to either have the user accept the request or actively log out beforehand. Everything else is just asking for a security disaster to happen.
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u/LoicAtTimeclock 13d ago
Rustdesk is shockingly bad. I don't understand why people keep on recommending it, has no one actually used it?
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u/ScratchHistorical507 13d ago
No idea what you're talking about. For me it always has been the best solution out there.
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u/Ontological_Gap 13d ago
You should take a close look at rustdesk, they have had so many issues with disabling system or user wide security features, I can no longer believe it's not intentional
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u/ScratchHistorical507 13d ago
...and you have actual proof or just wild claims? Because by default sessions are end-to-end encrypted, so I kinda doubt there's much they can disable that would actually make a meaningful difference.
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u/Ontological_Gap 12d ago edited 12d ago
E2e doesn't help at all when it's actively fucking your system configuration. These issues aren't honest mistakes, they are either intentional, or beyond wantonly careless, system compromises:
https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2024-25140/
https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/220
It's likely an APT project: https://tracxn.com/d/companies/rustdesk/__hVv0PUAcFB2LfybEPDvvPkJf14Mc7PfmkSGfqXkYxsg
I really need to pull an actual report together and submit it to CISA, if anyone still works there...
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u/JuanToronDoe 14d ago
This is a real pain and almost a deal breaker for me. RDP on Windows is among the few things that are dead simple and very user-friendly. I miss it so much. I tried Gnome Remote Desktop and Remote Login, RustDesk, Remmina, Pi KVM : nothing comes close to native Windows RDP.
I have an ultrawide monitor at work, so mirroring its display is a non-sense. And Pi KVM is limited to 1080p so barely usable.
Am I missing something ?