What do you guys think about RHEL 10 adopting RDP instead of VNC or Spice?
from potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish to linux@lemmy.ml on 21 May 01:10
https://lemmy.fish/post/15230967

RHEL 10 announced that RDP would be the preferred alternative to VNC. Red Hat replaced Spice with VNC in Red Hat 8 due to licensing issues with h.246. VNC is under featured and basic compared to both alternatives. Spice uses proprietary h.246 which caused disputes with licenses. RDP is proprietary to microsoft but has a few foss implementations.

#linux

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just_another_person@lemmy.world on 21 May 01:16 next collapse

VNC is outdated and outmoded.

Spice is, firstly, no longer developed, but second, not widely adopted.

RDP is open, has pluggable authentication, transport encryption, and an extensible backend.

Kind of a clear winner there.

lukecooperatus@lemmy.ml on 21 May 05:51 next collapse

Spice is slow as fuck too. It was so agonizing using my Windows VM (for Affinity Publisher) on Gnome Boxes because it requires Spice tools since the networking isn’t bridged by default for whatever reason and you can’t enable it without a bunch of fucking around, so network shares don’t function. Everything is done via Spice WebDAV, which gets disconnected every couple of minutes, freezing the VM filesystem while the Windows VM figures out wtf to do with itself and reconnects everything. It’s atrocious.

Eventually I spent the time needed to fiddle with the VM in Virtual Machine Manager and set up bridged networking. Now I can use normal network shares and it’s so much faster and more reliable.

I know this thread is supposed to be about the remote access parts of it, but Spice is damned annoying, in my experience. I don’t even want to be using a Windows VM anyway, the last thing I need is slow file sharing with my host OS.

jodanlime@midwest.social on 21 May 13:01 collapse

Every time I try to use Gnome boxes I walk away frustrated and confused. I thought it was just an alternative GUI that did the same thing as VirtManager. It’s doing something behind the scenes that is very different and not perfermant. I use spice with VirtManager daily and I don’t have issues, but I’m not using the spice webdav stuff either, just display I think.

krolden@lemmy.ml on 21 May 13:41 collapse

What’s this about spice no longer being developed?

jrgd@lemm.ee on 21 May 01:18 next collapse

Reading up on RDP as it’s something I do not utilize, I wondered just how encumbered RDP is compared to Spice and VNC. Wonder how third-party server and clients are handling the patent-encumbered protocol.

Do third parties implement an older standard of the RDP protocol that isn’t as encumbered?

potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish on 21 May 03:22 next collapse

Wikipedia says “As of February 2014, the extent to which open-source clients meet this requirement remains unknown.”

That’s old but may still be the case. However, I’d imagine if RHEL wanted to comply with mpeg’s h246 patents, they will do the same for rdp.

ganymede@lemmy.ml on 22 May 01:30 next collapse

Reading up on RDP

Microsoft requires RDP implementers to obtain a patent license

there it is. good info to dig up jrgd, well done! shame we had to scroll so far in the thread to find these actual proper, highly relevant details.

well, everyone has to pick their battles, and perhaps RHEL just couldn’t fight this one out.

but imo i’d much rather see VNC get some upgrades under RHEL than continue the ever increasing microsoft-ization of linux

nanook@friendica.eskimo.com on 22 May 02:17 collapse

@jrgd @potentiallynotfelix It is simply less capable than Spice, no support for accelerated 3D graphics.

ikidd@lemmy.world on 21 May 01:49 next collapse

RDP is very well developed and an open standard. I don’t have a lot good to say about Microsoft, but RDP is one of their wins. It’s blazingly fast compared to any other remote desktop protocol and there’s an extremely full-featured client for Linux in FreeRDP that can be used at the CLI or with one of the various wrappers for it.

If every distro just shipped and supported it for their desktops, it would make life much easier than knitting together the current underperforming patchwork of solutions for Linux.

nanook@friendica.eskimo.com on 21 May 02:12 next collapse

@ikidd @potentiallynotfelix It has no support for accelerated 3D graphics, spice with open-gl does this.

potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish on 21 May 03:09 collapse

I saw that RDP was proprietary. I know that some proprietary protocols have open source implementations, is that the case here?

catloaf@lemm.ee on 21 May 03:30 next collapse

docs.redhat.com/…/new-features-and-enhancements#n…

Looks like it’s part of the move away from X. It’s provided by the gnome connections app, which is GPL, so yes it’s open source.

ikidd@lemmy.world on 21 May 03:41 next collapse

I think the protocol is open, both for client and server. Microsoft’s implementation is proprietary, but there are other compatible implementations, KRDC is a server implementation of the protocol that is opensource that KDE uses for Plasma. It’s definitely not ready for primetime, I’m very hopeful this Redhat implementation gains traction amongst distros because Redhat has the resources to throw at it, and the ethics to opensource it.

LeFantome@programming.dev on 22 May 00:53 collapse

There are free RDP implentataiions

0x01@lemmy.ml on 21 May 03:58 next collapse

My biggest gripe with vnc clients is 8 character maximum password lengths for the default protocol. Straight up crazy.

rsolva@lemmy.world on 21 May 15:31 next collapse

RDP has been the default on Fedora since version 40 (or was it 41?) and it has been a true joy to use! Remoting in to help family and friends has been as simple as set and forget, and very secure since I use it via my VPN (no public endpoint).

I use Remmina to connect though, not GNOME connect, as Remmina is more configurable.

StrangeAstronomer@lemmy.ml on 21 May 21:38 collapse

The biggest problem with RDP for me is the lack of a Wayland/sway server. How does the Fedora Sway spin cope with this?