I have two systems right next to each other. One of them doesn’t have a monitor attached and it’s not simple to do so. They are both on the same 1Gbps LAN.

I’m currently using FreeRDP/xRDP to remote into the other system, but the latency is just terrible. I’m able to deal with it, but in some circumstances (like if dynamic ads or videos autoplay on websites) the latency just skyrockets to a a frame very few seconds. The remote system is Kubuntu 20.04 using X.org and not Wayland. I have just about every window decoration turned off or down. And just about every setting I can find to increase performance. The connection settings are the best they can be (I’ve looked through so many guides and posts about increasing performance), and they have helped a bit, but it’s still far from ideal.

I’ve even tried VNC and AnyDesk and they’re both just as bad, which is odd because I’ve connected to my brother’s system in another part of the country on many occasions, and even when he loads up a Youtube video the connection and latency is buttery smooth.

Does anyone here have any recommendations or suggestions on what I can use or do to improve the connection quality?

  • @[email protected]English
    8•1 year ago

    Earlier this month I tried some options. Just my personal experience as a basic user. Disclaimer: trying to connect over internet (not LAN) to a machine running Plasma Wayland. Some points I remember:

    • AnyDesk and RustDesk didn’t work.
    • xrdp has some issues like it doesn’t work if user is already logged in the physical machine when you try to connect. Also if I don’t manually logout before disconnecting from remote, my physical PC freezes, forcing me to reboot.
    • NoMachine and TeamViewer are good. I also quickly tested with X11 and performance was bad with AnyDesk and xrdp. RustDesk is in between the two pairs, closer to the good ones.
    • I couldn’t make NoMachine send audio, maybe because I use PipeWire?
    • NoMachine has better keyboard support, simple and important hotkeys like Ctrl+C didn’t work consistently for me with TeamViewer, even after searching for grab keyboard-like settings. Alt+Tab to switch active window also doesn’t work properly on TeamViewer, it’s captured by local machine instead of remote.
    • None of them were able to hide the screen (privacy mode) in the physical monitor. At least NoMachine can automatically lock the session when you disconnect.

    I ended up using NoMachine. I guess it has similar performance as connecting to a Windows machine using FreeRDP, but with some minor issues like no audio (for me this wasn’t important).

    So from my experience, I’d rank this way:

    • NoMachine > TeamViewer > RustDesk > AnyDesk > xrdp.

    Didn’t try VNC options because everyone says (from what I read) they perform poorly.

    • @CeeBeeOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Really appreciate the detailed write-up!

      I’ve used NoMachine in the past. But that was years ago. I think I’ll give it another try. Thanks for the input.

    • TipponEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      I’m controlling my Xubuntu media server using NoMachine from my Windows 10 PC, and NoMachine takes over some of the keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl, alt, and t opens a NoMachine menu instead of the terminal, for example.

      It’s only started fairly recently, so might just be a new setting that I haven’t checked yet.