Having switched from macOS to PopOS very recently, it’s been pretty smooth. My only real issue is that Remote Desktop support is worse than macOS which is itself far worse than Windows RDP. I know it’s a Linux/Debian wide problem, but I’d really like someone to step up and bundle something polished out of the box.
Use NoMachine. It's by far the *best* experience I've had and I love it. Sure, it's not free software, if that's your thing, but like, it's _really_ good (really good latency and quality). Works on Windows, Linux, and Mac hosts, and clients for all three as well.
That’s actually what I’m using. It’s the best I’ve found like you said but there’s no good support for rescaling/dynamic resolutions, and multiple displays. It’s good enough to click a couple buttons but not for any actual work, at least given my setup.
I've been using chrome remote desktop to get to a box and it's been alright. I also use teamviewer. Which is ok but struggles with scrolling.
I'm still pretty unhappy with myself for using chrome remote desktop though. It's something I wouldn't be doing if this system had anything private on it.
Vnc works for the basic use case of viewing a remote screen. It’s a mess for interactive use, especially with the default implementations you can find on Linux imo. macOS’s built in screen sharing is the only vnc server/client combo that has acceptable latency but even it fails to support basic features like dynamic resolution for different clients.
And I agree that SSH is definitely far more common; I of course use SSH but there are lots of reasons why an interactive desktop is either required, or just far more convenient.
It took me (way too much) effort but I managed to get a pretty stable and smooth RDP server set up on my desktop. Sadly, GNOME3 and RDP don't work well together, so it broke after a random upgrade and hasn't worked since.
You used to be able to use X11 forwarding quite well, but most tools I use tend to render their entire screens as a canvas causing way too many unnecessary updates. Wayland also makes it nearly impossible to do this on a modern system without compatibility layers.
When RDP on Linux works, it works pretty well. I'd love for someone in the GNOME team to find a way to make RDP compatible and easier to set up. There's a VNC setting in the settings somewhere, but VNC is pretty insecure and terrible for interactive work.
X forwarding via compressed SSH (ssh -XC) is likely the simplest bet, especially now that WSL has good support for it, if you need more advanced remote desktop you can take a look at x2go which is based on NoMachine's NX protocol.
To be honest the only good RDP I’ve used is Windows RDP. I’m not saying that Debian isn’t packaging a good alternative but rather I haven’t seen a good option that’s useable for interactive work.
