Screen sharing is a generic name for allowing the screen on one computer to be accessed from another. It is similar to, but different from, Windows Remote Desktop. There are a number of options that are mostly based on VNC. I have a Windows 10 Home computer here that has TightVNC Server installed on it, and with Remmina running on one of my Linux computers, the user session running on the Windows 10 computer can be controlled through Remmina, and at the same time as being displayed on the Win10PC's screen. This is different from RDP which locks the screen when you log in to the remote computer, although you are connecting to the same session.
However the scenario where I want to control the current session that is running on a Linux computer, is a bit more difficult because most VNC programs work differently under Linux than they do under Windows, including TightVNC for example. Under Linux, the current session under X-Windows (the basis for most GUIs in Linux, although Wayland is starting to be adopted as a replacement) can't be shared in most of the common VNC implementations. So these programs generally create a new remote session which the user can run stuff in, but they can't share the default user session on the computer. This means that many of the FOSS VNC packages won't perform this function and so you can't expect to install some VNC system and it will just work.
Exceptions to this include the following packages:
- Vino is the screen sharing package for Gnome. It is provided with Ubuntu and variations. Standalone packages are also available for other distros and will work with XFCE, but it is more and more being integrated into Gnome these days which makes it difficult to use with other desktop environments. I have used Vino in the past with Xubuntu, but the impression I have now is it would be difficult to use in Debian/XFCE because the configuration is supposed to be done with a Gnome-only tool. There is a desktop sharing tool in Cinnamon which is probably Vino adapted to a non-Gnome environment. I haven't used Cinnamon since I used to have Linux Mint a couple of years ago, so I don't consider this to be an option.
- X11vnc is a package developed formerly by Karl Runge. It is in the repositories of major distros such as Debian. It is easy to set up and install, but has not been actively developed for several years, and my impression of it is that it is not very reliable, tending to crash a lot. I remember a year ago using it with Xubuntu and it seemed to have better performance than Vino. (I will take another look at X11vnc to see if I just need to change some configuration settings, but I was unable to make it run as a service on my computers)
- RealVNC is unlike most of the other VNCs in that by default it shares the current Linux user session. However it is commercial software although a limited free license is available. I haven't bothered to install it because of this licensing issue.
- Xpra is a package that among other things is supposed to be able to "shadow" the current user session on a computer. I tested it and it seems to be difficult to configure and make work successfully. The documentation for it is tricky to understand. It looks like it has some potential but is either very complex in operation, or needs a lot of work to make it as user friendly as some of the other packages.
- X2Go is another open source community supported package. I am currently testing this on mediapc to be able to control it from mainpc. There is a specific package with it called X2godesktopsharing that is specifically used for the screen sharing functionality. Unfortunately X2Go turns out, like Xpra, to be another poorly written and supported package.
- NX/NoMachine is the last option to consider. X2Go is based on it. NX uses its own protocols and NoMachine provides a limited free version of a commercial package. There used to be an open source part called FreeNX but it is well out of development.
So I have been looking into a lot of options this week. There is in theory another option which is the Linux RDP clone which I think is called rdesktop. I haven't looked into that one.
Right now I only have NoMachine left to test having gone down the list, or I could still consider RealVNC if I run out of options.
