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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

I would like an RDP server for Debian / Linux. I currently use NoMachine as an adequate replacement, and to be honest it enables me to do the limited amount I need to do with minimal "getting in the way" and I've been using it satisfactorily for a few years. But it's just not the same smooth experience that I remember from using RDP; feeling like you're actually sitting at the machine (pending network bandwidth and conditions).

NoMachine is brilliant, however, given how much I paid for it. The "Enterprise client" is a free and no-install-necessary executable client, which I've found useful for allowing remote administration from a machine on which I don't have admin / install privileges.

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Try http://xpra.org/ - that's a "gnu screen" for X11, but bandwidth-optimized, can also relay USB, audio, ...

Just to give you an idea: I used it for forwarding a Firefox window across an UMTS connection when sitting in a train. (Long story: 32bit Java required to remote desktop into a client's environment across the Atlantic, ugh.)

I have tried xpra, and it was my go-to option until I tried NoMachine. I did try just forwarding windows, Firefox it was too, but there was some(times) frustrating delays.

I may re-visit, however, as the delays could have been network/environment issues rather than the technology.

Yeah I wonder why RDP on Windows is just so efficient. It is another block pusher as far as I understand. But it performs so well.

I've even used it over a 9600 baud dialup connection (a long time ago from a 2G mobile that didn't have GPRS) and it was usable to my suprise.

Are you sure on that first statement? I always thought it was akin to 'X' in that it simplified the connection based on an understanding of the windowing system. I guess I could have just made that up though.

No, I was wrong.. I've looked at the code of a Linux RDP server before (to identify an issue), and it was block pushing so I assumed this was also the case on Windows. But magicalhippo above corrected me. I didn't know about the GDI calls thing.

> It is another block pusher as far as I understand.

While that is the most basic thing RDP allows for[1], it also supports sending GDI draw calls[2] which is more like X-forwarding.

It also hooks into the stack at a lower layer than VNC and friends so when sending bitmap block updates it has the dirty area information directly available, and doesn't have to do a frame-by-frame delta to recover that information. This is a huge CPU hog from my experience when I did some work on the FreeRDP server component years ago.

It also supports using UDP[3] with forward error correction to improve performance over WANs.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocols...

[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocols...

[3]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocols...

Aha I had no idea it worked like that, with the GDI calls. That makes sense. There is definitely a performance advantage I've seen that's not matched when you run RDP on Linux. I assumed this was because of implementation issues but of course Linux doesn't use GDI so this makes sense, so it has to revert to block pushing. Thanks for pointing it out.

> I've even used it over a 9600 baud dialup connection (a long time ago from a 2G mobile that didn't have GPRS) and it was usable to my suprise.

Yeah, you can pretty much forget that with newer Windows versions.

You can tune down the graphical bells and whistles to make this work with newer versions as well.

Some discussion of this downthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30694601

apt install xrdp xorgxrdp will install the session manager and the Xorg modules to do that.

x2go is the best one so far.

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