Hello Dan!
07 Jun 25 08:50, Dan Clough wrote to Gerrit Kuehn:
Do you want persistent logins? Do you want access to the physical X
display (:0), virtual ones, or both? Looking for the client or the
server end (or both)?
Don't even know enough about it to answer the first two questions...
There is a difference if you want to share your physical display, i.e., the session that is displayed on the monitor connected to the server, or if you want a "virtual" session that is running on the server with no monitor hardware attached. Some software can do one, some the other, some both.
Which software you want depends on what you want to achieve: using the physical display remotely is more or less required if you want to give users in front of the machine remote help, i.e., see their screens, move their mouse, type for them.
OTOH, running virtual session enables you to hook up several remote users to a server, everyone running their own session. This way, you could, for example, use a more powerful server to run several (virtual) desktop environment sessions, each of these being displayed by a less powerful thin client.
Having "persistent" logins means that your virtual session (with all software running) is not automatically terminated when your client disconnects. Instead, it is waiting on the server until your client reconnects (which could be days later).
If you are familiar with tools like "screen" or "tmux" on the commandline (or in xterm): persistent virtual X sessions are pretty much the same concept, just using X sessions (including your full desktop if you like) instead of a textmode terminal.
If VNC and RDP above are not a requirement (but merely examples): I
am using x2go for a couple of years now (and try to avoid the other
two, if possible).
I'm assuming you avoid VNC/RDP for security reasons...
Well, depends on the actual setup and software you use, I guess. I probably would not recommend the original VNC ("realvnc") to anyone these days. TightVNC or TigerVNC usually perform better, provide more features and better security.
RDP, on the other hand, was invented by MS. At least for me, especially the server part always felt tedious to set up and clumsy to operate. This is probably caused by its "alien" (from *ix-perspective) origin. Admittedly, I have not used it for quite some time, maybe it improved meanwhile. I am using it on *ix systems as a client (remmina being my default client there) when I have to talk to MS servers. However, I would avoid the server on *ix systems if I have other choices.
I've added x2go to my list of candidates, and it looks pretty good.
I have used x2go in various scenarios over the last years, usually running the server on Linux machines to be able to operate their software from Windows, MacOS, *BSD oder other Linux boxes. It is reasonably fast, tunnels over ssh by default, supports using SSH key authentication and SSH jump hosts (so you do not have to mess with firewall rules and port forwarding if you already have an ssh port open), offers session management, persistance, access to the physical X display. On top of that, it is OpenSource and easy to set up, so for me there is not much more to ask for.
You have to take care a bit when using "fancy" desktop environments that come with compositors, transparency and stuff like that. My default desktop is xfce, x2go usually works fine with it.
Regards,
Gerrit
... 5:27PM up 182 days, 23:34, 10 users, load averages: 0.59, 0.68, 0.71
--- msged/fbsd 6.3 2021-12-02
* Origin: Dry thoughts for the tenant (2:240/12)