RDP Clients for Debian: An incomplete review

• rdesktop

  1 1,067 3.1 C

  🚨 rdesktop is in need of a new maintainter. Please see the home page for more details. 🚨

  

  rdesktop lost its maintainer[1] 2 years ago, and it looks like it just recently started having activity[2] again.

  I run xfreerdp nightly builds for everything, and I rarely have issues, might be worth looking into for your crashing issue.

  [1] https://groups.google.com/g/rdesktop-announce/c/AddglSNxK90

  [2] https://github.com/rdesktop/rdesktop/commits/master

• xrdp

  12 3,870 9.1 C

  xrdp: an open source RDP server

  

• Scout APM

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• Remmina

  20 1,779 9.9 C

  Mirror of https://gitlab.com/Remmina/Remmina The GTK+ Remmina Remote Desktop Client

  

  I also experimented a lot with remote desktop solutions.

  For client, I use:

  - Remmina - https://remmina.org/

  - Apache Guacamole (HTML5, browser based) - https://guacamole.apache.org/

  For RDP Server on Linux I use:

  - X11: xrdp - for a KDE guide, see https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/05/remote-desktop-with-xrdp-an...

  - Wayland / GNOME: Already integrated (beta, some caveats) - for a guide, see https://gitlab.gnome.org/-/snippets/1778

  Further notes:

  - RDP Server on Linux is very fiddly to get working reliable, while on X11 systems I found xrdp pretty straight forward

  - On modern GNOME systems the RDP server is already integrated, but there is a lot of missing stuff and I did not find a solution for a working RDP after reboot

  - Remmina as RDP client is good, but it takes some fiddling, if you are using HiDPI

  - Guacamole is not as good, but I use it as backup, which works in the browser

• ubuntu-xrdp

  1 6 10.0 Shell

  Docker fully implemented Multi User xrdp with xorgxrdp and pulseaudio on Ubuntu LTS (18.04)

  Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora ship with packages for it: xrdp (the session manager) and xorgxrdp (the actual X server that speaks the RDP protocol). I’ve been using them for almost a decade, and even got remote audio working on Ubuntu:

  https://github.com/rcarmo/ubuntu-xrdp

• xpra

  17 606 9.9 Python

  Persistent remote applications for X11; screen sharing for X11, MacOS and MSWindows.

  

  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.)

• Sunshine

  37 389 9.7 C++

  Sunshine is a gamestream host for Moonlight! (by SunshineStream)

  

  Speaking of this, I make a shameless plug.

  I'm a contributor for the Sunshine project: https://github.com/SunshineStream/Sunshine project, which allows Nvidia GameStream to be used on Linux systems with Moonlight clients. I haven't tested the Linux side of things, but it has many ways to both encode the screen or acquire it (via KMS, Pipewire or x11grab IIRC).

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