Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client • Hacker News Board

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#21

Post by stedaniels » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #19

How’s the experience of working on it? I’ve been struggling to get a decent remote setup even in my home lab due to network latency. Could be because I’m trying to drive 4K. Even Win10 RDP over a 1300mbps network struggles. I wonder if I need to bite the bullet and install a real graphics card in the R720. Would love to hear more experiences of others who remote this way where you are “offloading” your compute power…

I connect from Windows 10 client to a Windows 10 host using RDP driving dual 4K and it feels like native, though I mostly just use single 4K. This it’s my daily driver over a standard UK fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) connection client end to a gigabit connection host side.

I’m generally using office, internet, Windows terminals/ssh, IDEs etc. Very rarely an overly dramatic full page video advert will jolt me back to reality that I’m doing this over RDP.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#22

Post by whalesalad » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #20

whalesalad wrote: post #19

How’s the experience of working on it? I’ve been struggling to get a decent remote setup even in my home lab due to network latency. Could be because I’m trying to drive 4K. Even Win10 RDP over a 1300mbps network struggles. I wonder if I need to bite the bullet and install a real graphics card in the R720. Would love to hear more experiences of others who remote this way where you are “offloading” your compute power…

What switch/router is it going through? There's a lot of gigabit hardware that can't push gigabit speeds.

I have a totally over-engineered UniFi setup at home. I’m pretty confident the network is not the issue.

I experience the performance issues on the LAN, for instance, even with a 1,300mbps negotiated connection.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#23

Post by tyingq » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:14 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #22

tyingq wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What switch/router is it going through? There's a lot of gigabit hardware that can't push gigabit speeds.

I have a totally over-engineered UniFi setup at home. I’m pretty confident the network is not the issue. I experience the performance issues on the LAN, for instance, even with a 1,300mbps negotiated connection.

Ah, okay. And I guess you've already played with various group policy around compression, gpu acceleration (RemoteFX) , etc, for RDP.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#24

Post by znpy » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

I wonder how things like X2Go and LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) will be re-implemented when Wayland will take over.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#25

Post by tyingq » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

The X96 max referenced on the same site looks pretty neat. It's a little Android TV box that appears to be ~$30 or so if you order from China, or ~$65 from Amazon. http://www.multi-seat.com/x96-max/

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#26

Post by whalesalad » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #23

whalesalad wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a totally over-engineered UniFi setup at home. I’m pretty confident the network is not the issue. I experience the performance issues on the LAN, for instance, even with a 1,300mbps negotiated connection.

Ah, okay. And I guess you've already played with various group policy around compression, gpu acceleration (RemoteFX) , etc, for RDP.

RemoteFX is something I had not heard of - will take a look!

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#27

Post by beagle3 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:21 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #19

How’s the experience of working on it? I’ve been struggling to get a decent remote setup even in my home lab due to network latency. Could be because I’m trying to drive 4K. Even Win10 RDP over a 1300mbps network struggles. I wonder if I need to bite the bullet and install a real graphics card in the R720. Would love to hear more experiences of others who remote this way where you are “offloading” your compute power…

I saw you wrote that you don't think the network is your problem, but it could be. The 1300mbps and UniFI makes me think you are using a wireless connection, and those often deliver much lower bandwidth than they should, and always have more latency than I expect.

Use a wired 1Gbps connection. If it works acceptably -- which it has in every single setting I've tried -- then it is your network, though it might not be where you usually look (e.g. speedtest measures your overall bandwidth, but if you have many retransmits, you might have horrible interactive experience even with sufficient bandwidth).

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#28

Post by posix_me_less » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:36 PM UTC

raphinou wrote: post #15

buserror wrote: post #8

I use x2go all the time, I have one single big workstation, and the laptops and the "thin" machine in my lab are tethered to it all the time, even when outside, via wireguard. I'm not surprised a raspi can do that, as I've used an antique thinkpad x201 for doing it for many many years now!

I'm using freerdp client to connect to an xrdp server. I'm positively surprised of the good user experience it provides on a LAN. Anyone having hands-on experience comparing x2go and xrdp?

Do you know if there is a functioning xrdp server+client combination for Linux? I would like to try to compare to x2go. I tried some on opensuse last year but it didn't work.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#29

Post by hedora » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

A few years ago, on my raspberry pi 3, tigervnc was almost fast enough to drive fullscreen video. I had to recompile the jpeg library to switch to turbojpeg and rebuild tigervnc against that.

Hopefully this “just works” now on a raspberry pi 4 and newer raspbian, but I haven’t checked.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#30

Post by deburo » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #26

tyingq wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, okay. And I guess you've already played with various group policy around compression, gpu acceleration (RemoteFX) , etc, for RDP.

RemoteFX is something I had not heard of - will take a look!

Do you even struggle with RDP when you're on the same network?

We also have an R720 at work, running a Windows Server 2016 under Hyper-V and it performs very poorly (Windows UI is super slow, etc.). I know next to nothing about physical servers, but I've had great success swapping HDDs for SSDs in laptops to dramatically increase Windows' modern UI's performance. Our R720 has HDDs instead of SSDs, I've thought of upgrading them to see how it works out.

If you ever find a solution, please let me know.