I still don't get why GNOME moved to RDP instead of sticking with VNC.
Embracing Microsoft technologies to better fit offices?
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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I don’t care that it’s Microsoft, RDP is so much better than VNC.
I've used a bit xrdp and even less vnc. Can you please elaborate why is rdp better?
VNC is a bit dated, doesn't support auth as part of the protocol, and doesn't functionally support a lot things like dynamic screen resizing, and things like stream transport of audio.
Not saying RDP is necessarily better, but it is functionally faster at least, and implementations here are open source, not the closed MS version.
VNC might have seen improvements over the years, but last time tried it, it didn't handle high resolution/detail well at all. RDP can stream practically any media in close to real time, as to where VNC really broke down if you tried to change too much of the screen at once. Ideally, there'd probably be a new open screen sharing standard that used modern encoding and decoding to allow for high bandwidth connections smoothly. Moonlight gets close, but isn't really designed as an RDP/VNC replacement.
It's really just a codec issue at that point though. They COULD revamp, but why when you can just improve and make a new protocol.
In my experience moonlight is only really useful for playing games on a very fast connection. RDP on the other hand works well from even they worse connections
For sure, that's what it is designed for. A proper remote desktop system would need to be able to support low bandwidth links and gracefully drop frames if latency is high or bandwidth is low.
I don’t know much about the tech behind either, but when I’m using VNC it feels like I’m just remote controlling the mouse and keyboard on another machine via a series of streaming jpegs and when it’s full screen I either have to scale the display so all the elements on the screen are too small or too big, or have scroll bars.
With RDP it’s so smooth it’s like I’m on the other machine. RDP doesn’t just remote control the screen on the other computer, it creates a new desktop session formatted for the remote computer. Someone else can even use the other computer while you log in as a different user. I don’t know if VNC can do this but RDP can even forward local drives and devices to the remote computer, you could plug a USB into your laptop and have it connect to the machine you’re RDPing into. It’s so seamless that I often forget I’m using a different machine when I have it in full screen.
As far as I remember, RDP server in gnome (or any other exisitng DE) can't do multiple sessions yet. You have to be logged in via display manager to remote access the existing session via RDP.
That is correct. I think they were talking about XRDP
I haven't got GNOME's native RDP to work at all yet, but XRDP does multiple sessions.
It uses compression and is generally going to be more performant. It also has better security though strong encryption
and can be used from any old dumb windows computer without having to install software on someone elses pc, if i need to.
Because RDP is better for security and performance. FreeRDP is well supported and isn't going anywhere.
VNC is just very old and is missing features. It also has design limitations that can't just be overcome by adding standards.
It's a libre implementation of RDP. Regardless of who pioneered it, it's still open-source software, and Microsoft needs to keep RDP backwards compatible so it's unlikely they'll break it.
Worst case, FreeRDP can just go and do its own thing regardless of Microsoft
Transferring? Why not get rid of this atrocious thing?
They will in fedora 42