Access your PCs from ANYWHERE with REMOTE DESKTOPS (Linux, Mac, and Windows)

I need a made in japan linux distro, did you know any Japanese made linux distro?

Remina was lifesaver for my remote work.

so complicated your explanation

I've tried and failed several times to use the remote desktop in Linux Mint. There is no help and I couldn't find any documentation online.

I used Vnc a few times in the past, manually installed and it worked ok. The real problem I found, though: none of these will display the login screen. That's a deal breaker for headless servers. I have now settled on Teamviewer, which works well for me and even lets me connect to my PC frrom the Internet half a world away, despite my ISP having blocked all outside access by using CGNAT. This is because the server side registers on Teamviewer's servers.

I am using a GUI on my linux server. You can not stop me >:)

IMHO the best one above all is RustDesk

I liked your Linux distribution. What is it?

CHROME REMOTE DESKTOP Should have been mentioned!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Could you access one through a phone or tablet?

Have you ever covered the topic of virtual machines for gaming?

Recently, I had to run a Windows virtual machine on my Linux OS to play, Minecraft BE and The Forest.

The mouse sensitivity and what i think is screen tearing was ridiculous.
When I move my mouse, the screen spins all over the place way too quickly; like their the flash but way less pleasant on the eyes.


The only fix I came up with was lowering sensitivity to the point where it feels like lag.

I went next level with PiKVM. That way I can shut off/on the PC, enter BIOS, etc.

All these are local network remote desktop connection. Many of us want to access our machines truly remote, over the internet. There are programs that do that.

ssh -X ftw
just make sure you're on a gigabit ethernet network with a latency of less than 10ms

See, now when you say "today's sponsor is Kasmvnc" and then proceed to demo that, it doesn't really inspire confidence very much does it? For one, I am not sure why any goody two shoes open source project will actually spend money to sponsor themselves.

so sad RustDesk didn't get some love, fully open source and self hostable or you can use the public servers, i used to use it alot until i started hosting a vpn in my house, then i switched to RDP. basically everything the sponsor of this does but free and open source. if you haven't check it out please do so

You should give veyon a look. It’s foss and cross platform. Pretty easy to set up and works well. I’ve been using it for a while.

VNC through a SSH tunnel is the way to go, firewall everything shut to the outside, tunnel in, enable SSH compression, ..., profit

What's your take on NoMachine (!Machine if you're nasty)? I've used it for a few years between Linux, Mac and Windows and while it's a corporate entity it's been very solid for a number of years now.

I admit I was kinda interested in checking Kasm out until you said the config was in YAML. Die, YAML. Die.

RustDesk was a great remote desktop

DWService, or AnyDesk (X11-only on Linux) together with ZeroTier One, haven't failed exactly many times.

How about Google remote desktop? It's not ideal but did help out on things i needed it for.

In my experience over the years I have had the most trouble free work with Chrome Remote Desktop on cross platform.

Nomachine is my go-to remote desktop client/host combination.
Steam Remote Play also works as a low-latency remote desktop app if you have a Steam account.

This was a very different style…

Just wanna give a shoutout to the Gnome devs. Their rdp implementation in mutter is superb. It's really usable and far ahead of every other remote desktop solution on linux that I'm aware of. Good job! Now they only have to implement it headlessly

Excellent info. Thanks!

Nice video. I realise you wanted to keep it beginner friendly, but I think it'd be nice to just mention X11 original purpose and it's main "selling point" was to be able to run Gui apps remotely over a local network. Many people including myself still do it and for certain apps over fast local network the performance is indistinguishable from running same apps locally. Specifically, any app that doesn't use DRI or is capable of using IGLX (indirect rendering) can potentially run quite well. Few examples are xterm (faster than ssh over lan especially for full screen updates in vim etc), chromium(not as fast as local, but substantially faster than vnc). Apps that are not recommendeded over x11 on lan - alacritty and any other terminal that uses DRI (horrible latency, you're better off with vnc), Firefox (same thing). Another benefit of using X11 over lan is that you don't need root access to your "server" (the machine running the apps) and the server can be entirely firewalled as x11 has the server connecting to the "client" (reverse of vnc, rdp etc). So it is an ideal way to access a highly secure work laptop you're not allowed to install vnc on. I wish one day you or someone else makes a video about modern multi-workstation work flow that involves kvm switches with usb3 /eDP2 displays (once such kvms become available). I'd love to see one. Another video idea: sound/microphone/Webcam forwarding between Linux pcs so you can use your main pc's peripherals with various laptops without having to swap cables.

Upgrade from Windows 11 home, to Debian Linux! ;)

Last time I checked, Connections app in Gnome was horrible. It didn't autoscale, it didn't have any settings, and the video quality was extremely bad. I have used Remmina since then and never had any complaints about it.

rustdesk is a good tool as well. you can have your own server so your no dependant to any provider. (like anydesk)

vnc albeit handy, is really old and slow not a really solution to modern needs. something like sunshine + moonlight is better, it uses low latency hardware video encoding, while vnc is just a bunch of pictures send via stream. meanwhile greater solution, sunshine has not all functionalities of vnc. other solution is google remote desktop which is also fast (uses vp8 and vp9 encoding) but not straightfoward at all to setup in linux, also is a google service which sucks. its easier to setup sunshine in windows than linux because wayland or pipwire/pulseaudio but is doable. the truth is, nowadays there is not a really great definitive tool for remoting

Moonlight and sunshine are a pair of remote desktop systems that are performant enough for me to play video games like deep rock galactic from 2 floors away from my gaming rig.

My main complaint about RDP on Debian Wayland is that if you try to remotely access the Linux PC from an iPhone or iPad, the screen gets stretched and the mouse on the RDP client doesn't align with the Linux pc. Any hints on how to make this work?

Ahh yes...the nice young indian man from microsoft tech support called once and installed such thing for me...quite expensive it got, i must admit.

Rustdesk? Where rustdesk mate?
Its free, opensource, even the teamviewer-like server implementation, so you can run it on your own server. Performance kicks ass also.

not all can be managed on the cli easily. If at all.

The best so far is nx nomachine. Hands down, including over ssh.

i feal kinda bad for you on the sponsor front as because Linux and privacy services don't seem to do discount on sponsorships, people dont realy click your link. I got proton mail after hearing you talk about it for ages and completely forgot to use your link i just duck duck go ed it (dam that realy doesnt work).

RUSTDESK is also a good open source solution for remoting into Linux, PC, Macs from another system or Mobile device. Its free and open source and you can self host.

Try Sunshine/Moonlight for gaming and GPU intensive stuff.

RDP on Mac. IIRC 1) it costs $$ (pretty standard for MacOS I hear) and 2) doesn't support multiple monitors nor does it do I/O for sound/mic. Maybe that's what you get when you pay them but I refused to do that.

Disabling as many animations as possible can make a huge difference in the performance for RDP and VNC. Having application windows animate as they open or minimize will give you a laggy experience as seen with MacOS in this video. Mac's animations are some of the worst... at least it used to be... it's been a while since I've had to touch a Mac. In windows I disable almost everything apart from smooth scrolling and smooth font edges and it's ssssooo much better just in general and makes a huge difference for RDP as well. It's easy to do and worth a try if you've never tried it.

My "hack" for running remote desktops at home, is actually using SteamLink. Way faster than VNC, easily 60 fps and audio support ootb. Launching it in desktop mode with the same resolution as my client device, you'd be hard pressed to even tell I'm using a remote device. It even works when I'm out and about, albeit network dependant, since the bandwidth requirements are noticeably higher than VNC or RDP. I used it (once) while I was in a different continent, and while the input lag was severe (50-100 ms), and there were some compression artefacts, it worked. And yes, it's designed for gaming, but you can use it for whatever you need. The only requirement is that the Steam client is running on your host machine, and no Wake On LAN support, as far as I can tell.

I use remina everyday on my homelab and the only issue I have with it is it randomly disconnects and reconnects and I only use it on my internal network.

I've always found really bad latency when accessing a Linux computer remotely.

Thanks. Very useful video. Saved it on the list to access it whenever I need refreshing on the topic.