This may not be exactly what you want, but I use Apache guacamole for this. The client becomes a web browser, and a chromium based browser allows seamless bidirectional clipboard. I use Ubuntu VMs with Mate as the DM and with a few keybinds tweaked it is solid. I use tightVNC as my server which supports dynamic resize, and the soon to be released guacamole 1.6 supports sending dynamic resize (since the underlying libraries are now updated to support it; RDP in guac already supports dynamic resize). How performant is it? I have a single proxmox vm which runs 3 Minecraft instances for our server’s 3 bot accounts (which just stand still) and the desktop is still navigable.

I’m super happy and excited for GIMP 3.0. I hate that this info was presented in a youtube video. I can gleam what I want to know from an article with bullet points (which I could find) but I’m sick of half the information I search for being returned in a video, with a fixed time commitment and imprecise “scrolling” to skip. I feel like in search and link aggregators, more and more content is video instead of text and I’m not here for it.

My setup is a bit extreme, but here are my guardrails:

1. All users have the same UID’s on every system. I’m 1000, wife is 1001, son is 1002, daughter is 1003. All these exist on all systems. Our primary group is “family” (gid 10000). Our files are all owned by user:family. This matters because we let them have access to the share of things like home movies and pictures, and I have a TrueNAS with an NFS mount that their user folders rsync to nightly for backup. If you wanna get crazy, you can put in a whole LDAP/freeIPA setup, but that’s a lot (and I did all that as a learning experience).
2. They don’t have the account passwords. I have their password, and if they want to use it, the wife or I have to type the password. When we want them off, superkey+L to lock the computer, and if they reboot it comes to a login screen.
3. If you really go this route, and go the whole LDAP thing, you can also tie that into apps like Jellyfin. I have a huge library of movies and shows, but there’s a folder called “KidMedia” and I literally manually symlink things to that folder if I want them to have access. I set up the phones/tablet with their own jellyfin accounts, and when they log in they only see their media. I also NFS mount that share, so for the same reason, they can watch stuff on VLC from the computer with access control. We also do that with nextcloud, so we can use nextcloud talk to chat internally. The tablets/phones have built in android controls, so the idea is once they’re on their device, they’re free within the ecosystem I set up and they don’t enter credentials other than device unlock.

I built my kids potato computers from the time they were 3-5, which was during covid. They need computer skills nowadays, and it put them at an advantage for covid school. We got them on java Minecraft which was huge for reading, typing, and some basic math skills (they figured out multiplication for crafting things like doors). I made a chart which had icons of things they want, with the word next to it, so they could search and type in creative.

We used Ubuntu Mate. It’s simple, stable, and familiar. They do NOT have sudo on these boxes. As we’ve advanced, they now have firefox (behind a pihole which upstreams to opendns’ family protect), gimp (with a wacom tablet!), inkscape, calculators, tenacity, libre office, and they’re starting to get into some cad to make things to 3d print. You have to come to terms with doing a LOT of patient hand holding, but it has paid off dividends.

We tried to host it ourselves to save cost, and it’s a beast but it mostly works. It certainly lags behind in features and uses a lot of resources, but when you compare with the cost it’s certainly passable.

For sure for sure. What is your preferred mechanisms for feature requests? Small things, like in the browser pane, could we get buttons to launch terminals directly in the connections tree on the left, so I can launch the terminal without having to open the file browser for that connection, or likewise, adding a link in the connections pane to jump straight into the file browser? I envision a workflow where I keep 1 view open and can launch into file browsing or terminal directly from that view.

Have you considered embedding a terminal editor in the actual program? I use mRemoteNG on windows, and the integrated rdp/ssh with a sidebar full of bookmarks is the dragon I’ve been chasing on linux.

If this had remmina and vnc, and could embed terminals, it’d be a huge feature jump in my book (though it’s already great as a better way to manage my ssh sessions)

For real though, I loved those. That wireless Logitech one with the volume dial lasted me a decade.

I manage a lot of systems, so just click to open a ssh session in a new tab. I usually have shell aliases, but a bookmark that could set the title of the tab to the hostname and account for easier nav would be my goal. Being able to dynamically open tab groups too would be good, like if I have a dev/prod/SQL server for an app I could 1-click to open a group of 3 tabs

I’ve been looking for a terminal with better bookmark support; I use mRemoteNG on windows for my RDP/SSH work, and I haven’t been happy with any alternative on Linux that handles session bookmarks like that. I’m curious to try this.

They used to be but I’m not sure now; I think when they release the full self-manufactured ones I will want one.

I have had an s76 wild dog which was amazing for an 11 year run, and I just replaced that with a meerkat. I also have a thelio which has been flawless. System76’s desktops are amazing.

In 2013 I bought a darter and it’s the worst laptop I’ve ever owned. I went through 4 keyboards and still it doesn’t work, also the wifi radio is under the keyboard and you get a 50% signal reduction when typing. It had one of those trapdoor Ethernet ports which broke, so I basically became a dead device. That is an old metric, but it scared me off from buying laptops from them until they get their own hardware pipeline for them.

For a long time my setup was mate with Compton and awesome but I had to switch to just mate as my family and kids started using the computer more. Mate’s gtk suite is lightweight and complements awesome well as it gets out of the way, and caja/pluma/etc worked well with very few rough edges.

I agree, I had a darter that was garbage…but both my wild dog and thelio have been spectacular, and I trust their hardware and PCB dev absed on success in the thelio custom PCBs and launch keyboard. I think judging them by their clevo rebrand isn’t as valid as judging them by the launch and the thelio. If I needed a laptop, I’d strongly consider this