Looking to find your perfect remote desktop solution? Then look no further…
SSH has been the staple remote access tool for system administrators from day one. Admins use SSH to mount remote directories, backup remote servers, spring-clean remote databases, and even forward X11 connections. The popularity of single-board computers, such as the Raspberry Pi, has introduced SSH into the parlance of everyday desktop users as well.
While SSH is useful for securely accessing one-off applications, it’s usually overkill, especially if you aren’t concerned about the network’s security. There are times when you need to remotely access the complete desktop session rather than just a single application. You may want to guide the person on the other end through installing software or want to tweak settings on a Windows machine from the comfort of your Linux desktop yourself.
This is where remote desktop software comes in handy. Using these nifty little applications you can remotely access and operate a computer over the network from all sorts of devices. There are various protocols and while the clients we’ll cover in this article support multiple ones, we’ll focus on Virtual Network Computing (VNC) which is amongst the most popular.
Specifically, we’re going to evaluate and compare five clients: RealVNC, Remmina, TigerVNC, TightVNC and Vinagre.
A remote desktop sharing session involves a server and a client. The server component is installed on the remote machine that you want to access and the client is installed on the local machine or even on a mobile device such as a tablet. For this feature, we’ll use three servers – the RealVNC server built into a Raspberry Pi, the default Vino server in Ubuntu and TigerVNC server for accessing Windows PCs.
A good remote desktop client should be responsive, and as such we’ve rated responsive clients higher than those which do a wonderful job of replicating the remote desktop in true colour but take ages to register clicks and key presses. We’ll also keep an eye out for any related features that are included, such as the ability to encrypt connections. The clients and servers are also all running inside our network connected via Wi-Fi.
So, without further ado, let’s move on and compare these clients across a broad range of aspects – from available features, to the interface, multimedia capabilities and more – before we round things off with our final verdict.
All the clients in this article are rather equally matched in terms of features. That said, Remmina and Vinagre are the only ones that can sniff and discover a VNC server running on the network. Additionally, Vinagre can tunnel VNC connections through SSH and enables you to easily take screenshots of the remote machines.
However, with RealVNC and Remmina you can manually tweak the quality of the connection to make good use of the available bandwidth. Best of all Remmina lets you alter the colour depth of the remote desktop on the fly. The application encrypts VNC connections with the AES256 algorithm and also offers a button to send all keyboard commands to the remote server.
TigerVNC and TightVNC are both very similar since the former is a fork of the latter. TigerVNC uses TLS encryption by default. While the application encrypts traffic, it cannot verify the identity of the server. However, TigerVNC supports various other encryption schemes, such as X509Vnc, that do allow this.
Furthermore, TigerVNC offers users controls to manually tweak the encoding and colour level and a couple of other parameters depending on the available bandwidth. You can also use it to create view-only sessions and run a full-screen session on the guest. TightVNC offers pretty much the same features as TigerVNC, but some distinguishing features like the ability to transfer files are available only to Windows users.
Sound is not supported by any of the clients. Only RealVNC has the ability to transfer files. However, the file transfer feature along with several others such as the ability to exchange instant messages with the person on the VNC server are available only when you connect to a RealVNC server, e.g. the one pre-installed on Raspbian for the Raspberry Pi.
Furthermore, the client only encrypts connections to the RealVNC server (now known as VNC Connect). The client allows multiple sessions and can run sessions full-screen and scale the remote display to fit the current window on the client computer. It can also remember remote access credentials so you don’t have to enter them each time which is a definite plus, especially if you need to remotely manage a handful of machines. Simply double click on a machine from the RealVNC window to connect automatically.
If you’re a fan of using multimedia on your remote desktop, we suggest you give TightVNC a miss. Using the default settings you can perform simple actions like viewing PDFs but videos are barely watchable and games which rely on rapid keyboard presses such as snake4 performed horribly, with a delay of over two seconds.
Remmina performed better and games were playable without any delay even at the best quality on the remote Ubuntu server. However, we couldn’t watch video playback at any quality setting. At the lowest quality level the video was less jerky but the colours were wrong. At the other end of the quality setting the colours were perfect but the video skipped frames. The application could also easily scroll through lightweight PDFs at best quality, while scrolling through PDFs worked best at lower quality levels.
Similarly, you can easily scroll through PDFs and perform regular desktop tasks with RealVNC. You can get more mileage from your Pi using the experimental hardware acceleration mode which allows you to run applications such as Minecraft Pi, and watch videos with the built-in omxplayer, without any issues.
TigerVNC and Vinagre delivered the best performance. You can use either application to play games without any delays even at the best video quality setting. Video playback was also surprisingly good and we could easily scroll through all sorts of PDFs at the best quality.
There are several facets to the usability aspect of the client. First up is the interface for establishing the connection to the server. To score points for usability, the client has to offer the right number of features to define the connection without inundating the user with a sea of toggles and checkboxes.
Also, the client’s role doesn’t end when the connection is established. The post-connection interface plays a crucial role in helping you interact with the remote desktop. In this article, we’ll only rate applications based on the accessibility of post-connection features. The fact that some applications offer more controls than others, once the connection has been established, will be compared in a separate section.
We’ll break this slide down into mini-reviews of the interface and user experience, starting with…
You’ll have to define a new connection before connecting with the RealVNC client by manually entering the IP address of your VNC server. You can then either use the default settings or tweak them from the New Connection window. The General and Options tabs list common parameters while the Expert tab lets experienced campaigners modify the default values of various parameters. You can access these options during an active connection either by using the hidden menu at the top of the connection window or by pressing the F8 key.
By default, the RealVNC client also saves screenshots for connections. During an active connection the client also gives you the option to transfer files to and from the remote server and exchange instant messages. However, these options will only work when connected to a RealVNC server.
Before you can establish a connection, Remmina asks you to create a profile to define parameters for the connection. At the very least, you’ll have to select a protocol from a drop-down list and enter the server’s IP address. Optionally, you can define other parameters that vary depending on the protocol being used, e.g. for VNC connections, you can optionally choose the colour depth and quality of the connection as well as encryption. You also get checkboxes to toggle some quick settings like starting a simple View Only session and disabling encryption etc.
Remmina has an intuitive tabbed interface that enables you to manage multiple remote desktop sessions from a single window. There are a bunch of buttons for common tasks such as switching to full-screen mode or to the scaled mode in case the remote desktop doesn’t fit.
TigerVNC has a rather straightforward interface. However, unlike some of the other clients in this feature, it lacks the ability to automatically sniff VNC servers on the network and you’ll have to manually enter the IP address of the remote VNC server to establish a connection. While the default options work for most users, various connection parameters can be customised.
Besides the options to choose the encoding, colour and compression levels for the connection, you can also elect to only view the remote computer screen. Furthermore, TigerVNC enables you to share the clipboard with the remote VNC server and the application also makes it possible to choose the remote session screen size.
TightVNC is the only software in this feature to use a Java viewer. It also uses a simple textbox interface similar to TigerVNC’s. You’ll have to manually enter the IP address of the remote VNC server since the client cannot detect VNC servers running on the network. Again, you can either connect with the default option or customise any of the available settings. However, TightVNC lists all of the available options in one window unlike TigerVNC’s tabbed interface.
The differences between the two continue once a connection has been established: While TigerVNC uses a hidden menu, the TightVNC viewer lists a row of buttons at the top of the interface, and you can use these to customise any of the parameters for the connections – as well as sending various special keys to the remote VNC server.
Vinagre has a minimal interface that’s very much like Remmina. However, there aren’t nearly as many advanced options behind Remmina’s simple GUI. To connect all you need to do is pick a protocol from the pull-down list and enter the IP address of the remote VNC server. What makes Vinagre more intuitive and user friendly than Remmina is the very helpful Find button that hunts for active servers on the local network.
Also much like Remmina, you get optional checkboxes to start a full-screen session, a view-only or a scaled window. You also have the ability to select a colour depth from 24-bit true colour to 3-bit ultra-low colour, plus you can also enable JPEG compression if you have the resources to bear the processing overhead.
