RDP Clients for Debian: an incomplete review

I switched to Debian as the primary operating system on my main development machine, but still have the occasional need to access client servers over RDP or do some minor development on Windows Server / Windows 10. Generally I would run up a virtual machine with the client's access software in it (Forticlient seems to be most popular) but for my own VMs, it's good to have a general purpose RDP client.

Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection

The RDP client is available on most Windows installations, although you need to upgrade Windows 10 to "Pro" to get the server part working. Windows 10 is generally a bit underwhelming for a developer if you haven't got a "Pro" license anyway. The Microsoft client has quite a few features hidden away in the "Show Options" choice on the login screen. You can change the display colour depth and size, configure audio passthrough (glitchy, but sometimes useful), intercept windows control keys in full screen mode (very useful for Windows Server if you want to ALT-TAB for example). Intriguingly, you can also share local resources like ports and video capture devices and even file systems with the remote system, which appears like a monstrous security risk but is quite handy for moving software or config files around.

It also has the ability to connect through an "RDP gateway" which seems to have fallen out of favour with the rise of VPNs, which is a good thing.

In short...it's got a lot of features that you might not use, but in the past I've found the ability to share a local file system pretty handy.

Until I did this review, I didn't realise there were feature-complete replacements for Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection, so for complicated jobs I used to drop to a Windows VM, start whatever VPN is required, and use Microsoft's client from within there. That won't be necessary any longer thanks to the clear winner of this review.

Default installation: Vinagre (6/10)

Vinagre is a multi purpose remote desktop system that comes installed with Gnome desktop. It is happy to connect to VNC, SPICE, and SSH in addition to RDP, although for the purposes of this review I stuck to RDP.

Connecting to a Windows machine is fairly straightforward: Supply the machine name (or IP address), a valid user name and password and a domain. For most corporate installations the domain will be obvious. For a client machine where the login provided is a Microsoft account, you need to substitute "MicrosoftAccount" for the domain and supply an email address. Overall it's fairly snappy (obviously dependent on your network connection) but has no file sharing ability. One thing it seems to struggle with is re-connecting if the connection is dropped. The screen simply freezes, requiring you to quit it and restart the connection. Vinagre is able to keep lists of machines you regularly connect to as "Bookmarks", scales the screen acceptably and is largely fuss free. Multiple sessions are presented as tabs within the same window and the typing lag is acceptable.

On the downside, there are very few options in regards to gateways and no way to share files, and on my machine running Gnome desktop the clipboard didn't work at all.

Remmina: 9/10

I installed Remmina from the Synaptic package manager. It has far more connection options than Vinagre including the ability to go through a gateway, better sound redirection, the ability to use an SSH tunnel, serial and printer redirection, the ability to use smart cards for security etc. It is close to feature parity with Microsoft's Remote Desktop and even exceeds it in some respects.

Best of all, the "share folder" box replicates the drive attachment in the Microsoft product (Under a shared machine called "tsclient" in the file explorer) and the clipboard works.

Remmina will attempt re-connections when the network is interrupted, which is a bit slow but at least it tries. It can also resize windows to arbitrary sizes, although the results can be pretty ugly. Like Vinagre, multiple sessions are presented as tabs in a single window, although in Remmina there are a few extra tools on the left hand side for quick access to screenshots, grabbing the keyboard, resizing and disconnecting.

The small control window keeps lists of machine connections for you that can be organised into folders and you can keep passwords in there if you're not feeling particularly security conscious. Overall it's superior to Vinagre given the plethora of connection options and the ability to share files and the clipboard.

Boxes: 2/10

Boxes isn't strictly just a remote desktop client, it also has the ability to create virtual machines using virsh, manage them in a simple way and organise your connections. In practice, it lacks all the features you really want when connecting over RDP. The clipboard was not functioning on my machine, there is no file sharing and the login screen doesn't even have a "domain" box, so entering your username is somewhat hit and miss. As an RDP client, there are better choices.

The winner: Remmina

Remmina is a drop-in replacement for Microsoft's RDP, so even as a sometime Windows developer, I have one less reason to fire up a Windows VM to do system maintenance. Highly recommended.

Popular posts from this blog

Tailscale ate my network (and I love it)

Image
No matter where you go, there you are If you're like me, you travel occasionally. Access to your office from home, or from an airport lounge, or from a hotel room is paramount to being productive for most of us now. While I had a fairly simple Tailscale setup that got me into my test machines in the office, what I really wanted was to integrate my AWS production VPC into that system. It's surprisingly simple. Tailscale AWS instructions What do you want to do that for? In the "before tailscale" times, if I needed to test against the production AWS resources or connect dBeaver for database maintenance, I would edit the security group to add my IP address, do my testing, edit the security group to remove myself. This is as error prone as it sounds. I quite often forgot to remove my IP address from the allowed addresses, a major potential security risk when you are travelling. Tailscale has an extremely nifty way to get around it: if you run up a small ec2 ins
Read more

Stupid stunts with WSL2 , Python3 and AWS ECS

Image
Hand rolled CMS system gets a previewer The ongoing process of updating the help system on the SmartShepherd inspired two new features: editing of the html in a temporary location and a small web server to check your work before pushing it to production. The surprise? That GitHub desktop will show you a side-by-side view if you change an image file. Can't believe I didn't notice that before. Can you hold my camel for me? Sometimes I get so far down a dead end I don't realise how many issues could be sorted simply by re-thinking something. The initial deployment of the SmartShepherd web server was to an Elastic Beanstalk setup on AWS, mostly because I had no idea what I was doing. Elastic Beanstalk isn't really one product, it's more of an elaborate script that creates systems for you. In my case, it was spinning up a small Windows EC2 instance, installing the .NET Core website and auto-configuring a load balancer to point to that instance. I mean, it's
Read more

Time machine: Solaris 2.6 on QEMU

Image
You can never go home A big chunk of my professional career in the 1990s was spent with a Sparcstation on my desk. Before that the 68000 Sun2 and Sun3 floated past my sticky fingers but the Sparc machines quickly superseded those. I don't remember too much about which ones: pretty sure there was at least one IPX, one Sparcstation 5, a Sparcstation 10 and then the last one was most likely an Ultra 1 or maybe even an Ultra 5. It was a long time ago. Every now and again I think about how productive those machines were and do a little Ebay digging on how much one would be worth to have around. Except I don't have the room for more machines and the idea of trying to revive 25 year old hardware from that era is well beyond my electronic capabilities. Never fear, QEMU is here. Following these excellent instructions from Adafruit , you too can install Solaris 2.6 and have your very own emulated machine. Note that there is one instruction in there I am not sure you need. A
Read more