Linux Remote Desktop

G’day, all. Will throw this one out to the HLB brains trust.

For the rare times I use Windows now days, Remote Desktop is a very well polished feature. I tend to have a Windows VM set up on one of the Proxmox machines with specific Windows-only tools (or specific Windows versions of Windows-only tools in some cases), and start the VM to remote in to use those tools rather than maintain separate Windows PCs.

I’d like to do something similar with Linux - have a Debian VM set up in a similar fashion. (I understand I could probably use containers or distrobox or any number of other tools, but I’d like to keep the same workflow, if possible). I recall decades ago having X11 forward the desktop to another machine, but I don’t believe this is possible in Wayland? (If it is, please show me how!).

Searches seem to reveal a plethora of Linux Remote Desktop tools, with no clear stand out. Any recommendations from the HLB crowd? I’ve always found VNC variants to be laggy but functional. Fine for doing a spot of administration, but not really good for multiple hours of desktop work in the same way that RDP is on Windows.

It’s a while since I have had to remote into a desktop but freerdp was the best tool I found for both Window and Linux.

There are x11 and wayland versions. The freerdp3-wayland version is newer but did not have all the features of freerdp3-x11.

It was a bit of a pain to setup but fine once fully configured. On the Linux target machine I ran gnome natively but for remote sessions xfce was better. (The @techman would probably use Ice. :face_with_tongue:)

Techman has used IceWM for the last 26 years, on every everything, FreeBSD, Solaris,Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD and others.