Windows has a special rendering mode for applications when RDP is being used to optimise the connection by redrawing as little as possible. It has the ability to dynamically switch between crisp, pixel accurate forward-chunked-GDI-draw-calls mode to a connection speed based compression level of an H.264/H.265 stream. There are also a bunch of extensions related to GPU acceleration.
If you use RDP on a Windows server with a consumer GPU, you van hack the Nvidia driver to make more NVENC streams available (they're capped in software) to run more RDP heads without overhead.
RDP also does sound forwarding, local drive forwarding, printer forwarding, and USB device forwarding (up to a point). It also supports a wide range of security features and authentication as security requirements have increased over the years, and has built-in support for bastion hosts/gateways.
One very interesting feature is the ability to RDP only specific applications rather than the desktop. Cassowary will let you "use Windows applications" by using a Windows VM and using RDP to run the applications on Linux as if they were running locally (Cassowary also automatically suspends the VM which is what sets it apart). It's a bit like X11 forwarding, except your local files and drives available without extra commands to set up reverse SSHFS mounts.
VNC is to RDP what telnet is to HTTP/3. The underlying concepts are the same, but the implementations have very different feature sets and advancements. Does VNC even support passwords longer than right characters yet? Last time I checked, VNC servers still truncated your password.
Being proprietary, RDP support on Linux is very limited in comparison. RDP clients like Remmina support a surprising amount of features, but on the server side things aren't as compatible. For example, connecting to xrdp works great from desktop clients, but the Microsoft client on Android is slow as hell.
I've also experienced buggy behaviour on Gnome when FreeRDP tries to render window borders in app mode. Window borders don't get drawn right and clicks seem to be shifted by it for some reason.
I don't blame the FreeRDP/xrdp developers for any bugs or problems because RDP is a terribly complex protocol with tons of features, but sadly Linux doesn't seem to have an implementation or alternative that compares to Windows and RDP together.
> VNC is to RDP what telnet is to HTTP/3. The underlying concepts are the same, but the implementations have very different feature sets and advancements.
I don't know a lot about http3. This comparison does not make a lot of sense to me with regards to http2. What changes have been made in http3 to make it conceptually close to telnet?
You set up a connection between two servers and exchange text. HTTP/3 does a boatload more than telnet, but in its core it's just sending text back and forth with some optional special tricks.
VNC and RDP both solve "log in to a remote computer", but RDP does a lot more than just sending images one way and sending HID input the other way.
If you use RDP on a Windows server with a consumer GPU, you van hack the Nvidia driver to make more NVENC streams available (they're capped in software) to run more RDP heads without overhead.
RDP also does sound forwarding, local drive forwarding, printer forwarding, and USB device forwarding (up to a point). It also supports a wide range of security features and authentication as security requirements have increased over the years, and has built-in support for bastion hosts/gateways.
One very interesting feature is the ability to RDP only specific applications rather than the desktop. Cassowary will let you "use Windows applications" by using a Windows VM and using RDP to run the applications on Linux as if they were running locally (Cassowary also automatically suspends the VM which is what sets it apart). It's a bit like X11 forwarding, except your local files and drives available without extra commands to set up reverse SSHFS mounts.
VNC is to RDP what telnet is to HTTP/3. The underlying concepts are the same, but the implementations have very different feature sets and advancements. Does VNC even support passwords longer than right characters yet? Last time I checked, VNC servers still truncated your password.
Being proprietary, RDP support on Linux is very limited in comparison. RDP clients like Remmina support a surprising amount of features, but on the server side things aren't as compatible. For example, connecting to xrdp works great from desktop clients, but the Microsoft client on Android is slow as hell.
I've also experienced buggy behaviour on Gnome when FreeRDP tries to render window borders in app mode. Window borders don't get drawn right and clicks seem to be shifted by it for some reason.
I don't blame the FreeRDP/xrdp developers for any bugs or problems because RDP is a terribly complex protocol with tons of features, but sadly Linux doesn't seem to have an implementation or alternative that compares to Windows and RDP together.