Daniel Nashed's Blog

Ubuntu Desktop is pretty cool and supports RDP - what? really?

OK now that I have it working on a USB stick and can boot it any time, I am looking into more functionality.
The best way to run it would be native on a desktop or notebook.

But what if you need a jump host to connect to a customer environment or for other purposes?
Or you want to try out something and need to connect remotely to the desktop?

I thought the answer would be X11 and VNC. But ChatGPT came up with something better.

The answer surprised me and let me share what ChatGPT explained:


-- snip --

Why RDP makes sense on Linux today
Modern Linux desktops are Wayland-based, composited, and GPU-driven, where exporting a full desktop via X11 no longer works well and VNC’s pixel-based approach scales poorly.
RDP efficiently transports rendered frames and input, works cleanly with Wayland, and supports encryption and dynamic resolution. On Linux it is just a protocol: GNOME Remote Desktop uses it for screen sharing, while xrdp provides true remote login.

-- snip --

It's fully integrated into Ubuntu deskop and can be just enabled in settings.
I would not run that remotely on a hosting provider but it can be tunneled to the Linux box via SSH nicely (this is how I operate all hosted Windows servers too).

Once enabled you can just use RDP to connect to it.
Sounds really weird. But it really works very very well including copy & paste.

For testing this is very convenient. But in most cases you would run a native Linux host and use RDP to connect to Windows boxes.

Ubuntu Desktop is amazing easy to use and very cleaned up. It all just makes sense and the controls also all make sense.

Now I have a transportable workstation which I could even boot from VMware if needed as a machine in parallel. And I can RDP from the host into the guest.

I could imagine more scenarios which would be possible. Not all of them make sense in production.
But I am also thinking about test environments and sandbox environments.

-- Daniel

• Comments [0]