Is there a better remote desktop for Linux?

Posted by Oopsiforgotmyoldacc@reddit | linuxadmin | View on Reddit | 26 comments

Windows RDP works pretty well for me, but trying to use a Linux desktop over RDP has been painfully slow.

My home internet connection isn’t great, so I often work remotely through Windows RDP. At home, I’m using an Asus ProArt monitor with a 5120×2880 resolution as my main display. With Windows, it’s totally usable: resizing windows, moving things around, and normal desktop work all feel smooth enough.

For some tasks, though, I also need a Linux desktop. I set up an Ubuntu desktop machine in a data center and configured xrdp for remote access. The connection works, but the performance is really bad. Opening or resizing windows takes several seconds, screen redraws are slow, and the whole desktop feels too laggy to use properly.

Is this just a known xrdp/Linux issue, especially with very high-resolution displays? Or would I be better off using another remote desktop for Linux instead? (I’m not very familiar with Linux)

[-]

AdInevitable8483@reddit

Try rustdesk

zalnaRs@reddit

Why didn't you use the GNOME's built-in rdp server?

alexkey@reddit

1 - why do you need a desktop access on Linux on datacenter? That seems like a crutch unless you have a very specific workload that requires GUI (even then lots of workloads are available as headless like word/excel/pdf and browser). If you don’t need GUI specifically, SSH is the correct answer.

2 - if you still require GUI, RDP is MS designed proprietary protocol, xrdp is open source implementation of that protocol, but the protocol being owned by MS, any non official implementation will likely have issues/bugs due to lack of transparency into specifics of the protocol. That being said there are non-MS owned protocols, for example most common on Linux is VNC, there are a few tools that implement VNC, so pick whatever you need.

3 - OTOH, like others pointed it is also about settings, RDP uses a lot of bandwidth (VNC will too), because it basically streams graphics over network, think of steaming videos, higher resolution / bitrate requires more bandwidth. So reduce resolution, change colour depth to lower value etc.

WizeAdz@reddit

FastX is what we use. Commercial application, though.

megoyatu@reddit

Have you tried version 5 on an OS that is "Wayland only" like Ubuntu 26.04? We're finding it may not meet our needs anymore and we're looking for alternatives.

dev_all_the_ops@reddit

NoMachine

skrugg@reddit

that high of a resoultion takes a lot of bandwidth. Any protocol is going to have high requirements for bandwidth due to the resolution. VNC tends to work better in Linux. No Machine works too. Whats your DE? If you use KDE it has a built in rdp that has worked pretty well for me in the past. I've had good luck with xrdp on x11 systems but haven't tried it much with wayland.

snark42@reddit

NoMachine is by far the most performant remote desktop in my experience.

presleydc@reddit

Thinlinc

craigmontHunter@reddit

Thinlinc is incredible for how well it performs, I don’t know how they’ve tuned it so well, but for performance Linux GUI connections it is the best I’ve found.

XRDP is ok, VNC is better, but neither one is as performant as Thinlinc is.

Ancient-Bat1755@reddit

Which is most secure?

XRDP can enforce the same security as Windows, Thinlinc pipes through a SSH tunnel. VNC can be set up to encrypt, or it can be unencrypted. It’s been quite a while since I’ve used regular VNC, it’s all either Thinlinc for HPC/Cluster or XRDP for workstations.

Thanks! Using xrdp its not bad

CoderDevo@reddit

BTW, your video cable transmits 26 Gbit/s from your PC to your monitor.

Sounds like your home network is maybe 1/10th of that?

You will need a lot of compression and have to turn off features such as desktop background (and font smoothing?) to improve performance.

trisanachandler@reddit

I've had great luck with remmina and xrdp, but I had to make some config changes.

Cruffe@reddit

The most performant solution I have found is using Sunshine/Moonlight. It's actually good enough to stream games at high framerates and minimal latency, so it's plenty good enough for average remote desktop.

Someone even made moonlight-web-stream which can be used to stream your desktop straight into any modern browser, not needing to install anything extra on the client side. Still performs well enough to actually game on, so plenty good enough for the average remote desktop experience.

You can set the bitrate easily, but it's obviously gonna be at the expense of video quality as the stream is being encoded/compressed and lower bitrate means more compression.