RDP/VNC (1)

TOC

I researched on the current tool choices for RDP/VNC.

GUI remote access client

Here, remmina is missing SPICE support in Debian 12 bookworm due from GTK+1 to GTK+2 library transition. That should be fixed soon?

BASICS:

• RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol): originally Windows focused
• VNC (Virtual Network Computing): originally Linux focused, uses RFB protocol
• SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments): QEMU focused. See Spice for Newbies

NOTE:

• gnome-connections was split out from gnome-boxes and is the choice for RDP and VNC on GNOME
• vinagre and remmina are reasonable choices for RDP and VNC on non-GNOME platforms
• remote-viewer is the choice for SPICE on GNOME and others
• Keep away from very outdated rdesktop and grdesktop.
• All modern RDP clients are based on freerdp library as their backend
• popcon stats

RDP/VNC server

• GNOME has moved from vino package (VNC) to gnome-remote-desktop package (RDP).
  • Enable RDP feature from CLI using grdctl(1) on GNOME.
  • vino is without maintainer
• If RDP server is needed for non-GNOME platform, use xrdp package.
  • Use xrdp(8) to run RDP server.
• If VNC server is needed, tigervnc seems to be a reasonable choice. (x11vnc is archived)
• popcon stats

RDP v.s.VNC

When GNOME Desktop dropped VNC support, there were discussion on Debian BTS which states “… RDP offers better performance, better privacy, and better client app availability. …”.

Conclusion

• Use RDP over VNC for container and remote hosts
• Use SPICE for qemu/kvm and xen