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Ask HN: Are any remote desktop solutions good enough for full-time use?

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41–50 of 57 posts

Re: Ask HN: Are any remote desktop solutions good enough for full-time use?

#42
I've been using Apache Guacamole for a few years now to connect to my RDP / VNC machines at home. One of the biggest points is beeing able to connect to a machine with a modern browser without using any Plugins. As far as I know version 1.0.0 is going to be released soon, so just wait for this as the setup is a huge PITA.

Re: Ask HN: Are any remote desktop solutions good enough for full-time use?

#43

Buy a Steam Link and a raspberry pi, and two usb eth adapters, create a ZeroTier network and configure the pi (openwrt) to get internet from one of the adapters and share both the internet connection and the zerotier connection over the second adapter. Configure the zerotier network on your computer and set ul Steam In-House streaming. Then you can take the pi and steam link anywhere, plug a mouse, keyboard and scree…

I'm intrigued, seems like a fun weekend project.

ZeroTier is to fool the Steam Link to work over the Internet, or to improve latency?

How are the (physical) connections made? I understand one of the Pi USB/ETH adapters needs to be connected to the internet and the other to the native ETH Steam Link, what about the native ETH Pi port?

Sorry for (probably obvious) questions.

EDIT: cleaned

Re: Ask HN: Are any remote desktop solutions good enough for full-time use?

#44

Were Windows involved at both ends, you could start with RDP. It has many low bandwidth solutions. It uses local assets on the client to reduce data sent by the server. It's been the primary method of remotely administrating Windows servers for over 20 years. And some distros support the protocol now too.

My experiences with RDP on Linux have been truly excellent. I often spend all day working on a client's Windows servers from my Ubuntu machine on a 4K display and the experience is no different to running Windows natively. I use XFreeRDP FWIW.

I'm usually running one or two local Windows or Ubuntu VMs on my MacBook while remoted in to two or three Windows machines with RDP. The local Windows VMs give me infinitely more trouble, even just considering the memory limitations of a single laptop. On the other hand, there's honestly no perceptible difference between the RDP VMs and running Windows natively. I would do all of my Windows work on them, except I have to ask our sysadmin to spin up any new VMs on our server and I am constantly building new VM images from scratch.

Re: Ask HN: Are any remote desktop solutions good enough for full-time use?

#47
post #9

This is a good question! I've been considering having a similar setup for my wife. She's a chromebook user and often needs to run software like SPSS that's exclusively to Windows. I don't have a solution for the OP, but if anyone else is in a similar situation of needing a Windows machine every now and then this might be useful. We went with an Amazon WorkSpace solution, they have clients for a wide range of devices…

I've used Paperspace (a competitor for WorkSpace) for strategy gaming on a Thinkpad X201 running Debian, and it worked fine. They don't offer 40h, but the price per hour seems cheaper ($0.07/h for their basic machine, the Air).

Thanks! Hadn't heard of them but I'll check them out. The gaming option looks interesting actually :)

Re: Ask HN: Are any remote desktop solutions good enough for full-time use?

#48
I set up a Linux VNC desktop using a $20/mo digital ocean server. I connected to it securely over SSH. The setup itself worked fine.

From my apartment with 300/30 I had no issues, but coffee shop internet varied. If 2 guys started watching YT, the responsiveness dropped fast.

Re: Ask HN: Are any remote desktop solutions good enough for full-time use?

#50

Buy a Steam Link and a raspberry pi, and two usb eth adapters, create a ZeroTier network and configure the pi (openwrt) to get internet from one of the adapters and share both the internet connection and the zerotier connection over the second adapter. Configure the zerotier network on your computer and set ul Steam In-House streaming. Then you can take the pi and steam link anywhere, plug a mouse, keyboard and scree…

Moonlight works really well on my Raspberry Pi 3 (with everything connected on ethernet) and is really easy to setup.

Pretty neat if you want to remotely use your PC on a TV

I haven't done any test using it on internet but it seems to be possible.

https://moonlight-stream.com/

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