On Fri, Jul 19, 2024 at 15:33:40 +0300, Anssi Saari wrote:
> I've mostly used VNC and x2go for Windows-to-Linux and Linux-to-Linux.
>
> VNC was and is:
> - Solid and we actually use it at work too.
> - Limited in the number of mouse buttons at some point to five, minor
> but annoying. At the time I was used to 7.
> - In VNC you run a desktop in the remote end so that needs to be
> configured and maintained. I'm not a fan of this since it's usually
> just a small handful of apps I want to run.
You don't *have* to run a full desktop on the remote end. You can run
a smaller, lighter set of applications if that suits your needs.
At work, I maintain a set of VNC sessions on Linux workstations for remote
Windows users to use. The workstations themselves have KDE installed,
and if someone's sitting locally in front of the machine, they can login
and use KDE, with all of its bells and whistles. But for the VNC sessions,
I use fvwm, with a customized menu, and a set of programs that get launched
at session start.
In my experience, the Windows users have been able to adjust to this
quite easily. After they were told how to open the menu from the
"background", everything else was intuitive.
The only difficult thing was getting copy/paste to work. I did this by
installing the "autocutsel" package on the workstations, and adding
autocutsel -fork
to the ~/.vnc/xstartup scripts. Then I added crontabs to launch the VNC
sessions at boot time. Each user is "assigned" to a specific VNC session,
which is launched with a resolution customized for their monitor(s). If
they change their monitors and need the VNC session to run at a different
resolution, they contact me, and I work with them to get it changed. (In
theory they could ssh into the workstation and do it all themselves, if
they knew how.)
It's been working well for us.
