In preparation to the end of support for Window 10 we are looking into replacing Windows on some older computers with Linux, in particular Kubuntu.
We don’t want to throw away perfectly good hardware just because Microsoft decided that Windows 11 should not support it. And we also don’t want to pay Microsoft for extended support.
These computers are only used when working from home as RDP clients to connect to the actual PC in the office. They use a dual monitor setup with 2 HD (1920×1200) monitors and this of course should be available on the remote computer too. The connection to the office is tunneled through ssh.
While setting up a test computer I found that there are quite a few tools that can be used as RDP clients. I tried rdesktop but it turned out to be a bit too complex to set up and support for people who don’t know anything about Linux. For whatever reason I could not get KRDC to work with a tunneled ssh connection.
Then I found Remmina. That one looked perfect, because it has built in support for ssh tunneling, so no additional tool was required and everything could be set up in one configuration.
The first tests went well. I could connect to my computer in the office and work on it the same way as I currently do from my Windows 10 client. Then I tried the dual monitor setup and run into a snag: The two monitors were apparently presented to the remote system as one monitor with twice the width. This has the unfortunate effect that all dialogs that are centered (which means: Most of them) get shown across the monitor boundary. That’s just too annoying to tolerate.
So I searched the web – ignored those pesky AI generated answers – and finally found this hint on Reddit:
I had the same issue. I installed freerdp2-x11 and manually remote accessed my W10 machine through terminal with:
$ xfreerdp /v:/u: /multimon That worked fine, with three screens, all with different sizes. After that, Remmina started working fine with multi-monitor support.
That looked a lot like black magic, but since I found nothing else, I tried it anyway. And guess what, not only did xfreerdp connect and work fine, it apparently really does “something” to the installation that also makes Remmina work fine. I hope the colleague who is going to use this computer will be happy with it.
I also tried a mixed monitor setup where one monitor uses a scaling of 100, the second one a scaling of 125. This does not work well. On the remove computer the scaling did not work at all. But that’s an issue I can solve some time in the future. For now all the computers in question use a scaling of 100.