I was wondering if there is an implementation of Seamless RDP for Linux servers, preferably Debian or similar, giving the result and experience of Microsoft's RemoteApp. Of course with Linux apps, I mention RemoteApp just for comparing.
I don't want to just forward X with SSH. For what I know, X forwarding over SSH is not the best thing. Also I wish to avoid VNC as is pretty inefficient and I don't want the entire desktop. I'm searching for the same integration that offers Microsoft's RDP / RemoteApp.
The scenario is a powerful Linux server with much RAM, and a quite limited both in RAM and CPU Windows client. So what I want is to take advantage of server resources by doing the hard work on it and only display the GUI, as if it were locally installed, in the client.
I've researched a bit and the closest thing I found was a RDP client for Linux, allowing to use RemoteApp from a Windows server. But as I said, I want to serve Linux apps to a Windows client.
Last but not least, there is a solution that allows GPU processing in server side? Using RDP on Windows servers always shuts down the real driver and works with a virtual one, with exeption of RemoteFX.
It's OK if this is possible with other thing, not RDP.
Thank you!
Best Answer
I've searched for this very same thing (remote unix application integration with windows desktop) and the short answer is "well, sort of."
If you're on-LAN with the server, you can use plain X forwarding XDMCP-style or just specify the DISPLAY to be on your desktop X server directly and launch apps on a client-side X11 server like Xming. The latter is what I find myself doing most often.
As far as I can tell, there is no seamless application integration framework that uses VNC. VNC's RFB protocol is very efficient at transferring display data, but it doesn't do much of anything else; no copy/paste buffer synchronization, no file transfer, no audio, and no window management integration.
If you have high latency between the source and destination, NX is kind of a caching and compression method on top of X11 which can eliminate a lot of the perceived latency and reduce bandwidth significantly. NX does support a seamless mode in its workstation and higher products, which they call "Floating Window Mode," but that is not available in the free versions of NX to my knowledge.