As far as I'm aware there are no good RDP servers on Linux.
By good I mean one that would give an experience at least somewhat close to RDP on Windows. All the ones I've tried have been orders of magnitude away.
A good one should also allow for a key RDP feature which is to seamlessly transition between physical and remote desktop sessions. Meaning, I log in to my desktop at home, I leave and log in via RDP and get the same desktop session, which I can again resume when I get back home.
This is either not possible or doesn't work well last time I tested xrdp and friends.
Of course, if things has changed in the last year or so, I'd be delighted to hear about it. A good RDP server for Linux is what's keeping me from transitioning away from Windows on my main machine.
> Meaning, I log in to my desktop at home, I leave and log in via RDP and get the same desktop session, which I can again resume when I get back home. This is either not possible or doesn't work well last time I tested xrdp and friends.
Strange because x2go performs better than anything else. Though you have to set the "Connection" settings correctly for your use. Setting for too low a bandwidth is just as bad as too high. "WAN" with "256-jpeg" works pretty well for me.
NoMachine has been the nicest option I've found. I've previously tried x2go and xrdp, and whilst they worked, I kept looking for something better until I found NoMachine.
You're probably aware of this, but once the connection has been mediated via the cloud, data will usually flow directly between client and server. But yes, to avoid this initial connection mediation, you'll need the "Cloudless Fluid Connections" from the Enterprise team plan[0]. I use the basic $35 single user macOS program which requires cloud mediation.
I don't like the forced cloud mediation either, but the protocol is just so much better, almost comically better, than NoMachine, RDP-over-macOS, VNC, X11-forwarding, Screen Sharing.app, etc.
Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora ship with packages for it: xrdp (the session manager) and xorgxrdp (the actual X server that speaks the RDP protocol). I’ve been using them for almost a decade, and even got remote audio working on Ubuntu:
