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The biggest problem with RDP for me is the lack of a Wayland/sway server. How does the Fedora Sway spin cope with this?
VNC is outdated and outmoded.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.
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.
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.
What's this about spice no longer being developed?
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.
I saw that RDP was proprietary. I know that some proprietary protocols have open source implementations, is that the case here?
There are free RDP implentataiions
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.
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 @potentiallynotfelix It has no support for accelerated 3D graphics, spice with open-gl does this.
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.
My biggest gripe with vnc clients is 8 character maximum password lengths for the default protocol. Straight up crazy.
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?
Reading up on RDP
Microsoft requires RDP implementers to obtain a patent license
there it is. good info to dig, up 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
@jrgd @potentiallynotfelix It is simply less capable than Spice, no support for accelerated 3D graphics.
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.
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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