Best Remote Access Solution for the Home?

[quaz77]

I started a new dev job in the middle of the coronavirus lockdown. Naturally, I set up my dev environment on my desktop PC at home. The company is currently looking into progressively reopening the office so I've been thinking about how I'm going to juggle between the two dev environments I will have on my desktop PC at home and my laptop when I'm in the office/away. I had the thought that it might be cool to have only the one dev environment on my desktop and to remote in with my laptop. I have a decent desktop with wake-on-LAN and a fast internet connection that should be able to handle this scenario no problem, and I even have a spare computer that I can use as a server to act as a gateway to my home network (VPN or SSH Tunneling).

 

What I don't have (or know about...) though, is a good, open-source or relatively cheap, remote desktop protocol or software. I've tried VNC, and "remote support" type software like TeamViewer, RemotePC, Zoho Assist but I found them to be either too slow, have poor image quality, have heavy clients that like to add badges all over your screen or are inconvenient to work with when the host and client have different screen resolution/configuration, which is my case. I've tried RDP, which I liked better what with its different session management approach, but I found it to be extremely slow, even when remoting in on the LAN. Now I have used enterprise grade remote desktop protocols/VDIs such as Citrix's IPA, VMWare Horizon and PCoIP (even RDP in some cases) and found them all to be extremely usable, so my issue is not because I just don't like the remote access experience. I can tolerate some input lag, but the RDP setup I tried was way too slow. On input, the screen would change with a slow-moving scan line from bottom-to-top, basically unusable.

 

The host and clients are running Ubuntu 20.04 (the client has a high-resolution of 3000x2000, which may be why my RDP experience wasn't great), and the "gateway" server is running Ubuntu 18.04. The RDP setup I tried was with xrdp as the server and Remmina as the client. I am looking for any recommendation for a different RDP setup I could try, or a different remote access software/protocol that is either open-source or relatively cheap. Thanks!

[Windows7ge]

The only two I can think of that you haven't listed here would be AnyDesk & PARSEC

[quaz77]

13 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

The only two I can think of that you haven't listed here would be AnyDesk & PARSEC

Parsec looks very promising here, I'll give it a shot later today!

[Windows7ge]

20 minutes ago, quaz77 said:

Parsec looks very promising here, I'll give it a shot later today!

It's primarily intended for games but it works as a full remote desktop client so technically it could be used for anything. My own experience with it could have gone better but perhaps you'll have more luck.

 

One quirk of it though is the server requires GPU acceleration. OpenCL/OpenGL

[quaz77]

On 6/9/2020 at 9:56 AM, Windows7ge said:

It's primarily intended for games but it works as a full remote desktop client so technically it could be used for anything. My own experience with it could have gone better but perhaps you'll have more luck.

 

One quirk of it though is the server requires GPU acceleration. OpenCL/OpenGL

Unfortunately, it looks like Parsec can only host Windows. However, I was fortunately able to figure out a better setup for RDP, so if anyone has the same problem, see here: https://github.com/neutrinolabs/xrdp/issues/1026. TL;DR: use RemoteFX for color encoding and if using Windows' native client, set your connection type to LAN regardless of how you are accessing it.

[Windows7ge]

12 minutes ago, quaz77 said:

Unfortunately, it looks like Parsec can only host Windows. However, I was fortunately able to figure out a better setup for RDP, so if anyone has the same problem, see here: https://github.com/neutrinolabs/xrdp/issues/1026. TL;DR: use RemoteFX for color encoding and if using Windows' native client, set your connection type to LAN regardless of how you are accessing it.

I don't know about server-side but the client-side software is available on Windows, GNU/Linux, and I think Mac (don't quote me on Mac).

 

If you need the server running GNU/Linux I didn't think to check that before recommending it. Sorry.