Remote desktop vs. remote display [LWN.net]

Remote desktop vs. remote display

Posted Feb 13, 2013 23:13 UTC (Wed) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
In reply to: Remote desktop vs. remote display by madscientist
Parent article: LCA: The ways of Wayland

Just in case you hadn't seen/heard about it yet... there is the FLOSS program xrdp. It is basically a service that uses rdp for two end points... but on the remote system there is a VNC shim between rdp and the host.

I believe you can do a single application with it or a complete desktop.... and even if not... who cares. You can have the whole desktop with your single app running. If it is more efficient for the client side that's all they care about. The remote side has the whole desktop but you can make that be a very light-weight window manager if desired.

Now, with a full desktop in the window you can run lots of applications and the speed on the client side doesn't really change. In fact there might be times when you want to do just that. Open up 3-10 different X applications and see how well that functions. It'll be way slower. I'm sure you're counter would be... "who wants to do that?". Ok, you are probably right... but I'm just say'n. :)

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Remote desktop vs. remote display

Posted Feb 13, 2013 23:50 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

Just to be clear I'm not talking about creating a thin client/server environment or something. I have a system I use at work. It has dual displays, both of which are very large. It has multiple workspaces. All my applications run natively on this system (it has lots of CPU and RAM). I have a system I use at home. It has one, smaller display. It has its own workspace layout. I do "home stuff" on it, but I also want to do "work stuff" on it.

My "work stuff" involves running (and stopping, and restarting) multiple applications, all of which have their own windows. At home I move the windows to different workspaces, as my display is smaller. I do not want to have all my remote windows "captured" inside a single remote desktop, especially one which is the size of my very large dual-screen desktop at work.

Then sometimes I log into work from my laptop, which has its own, smaller display size. Etc.