Brickfrog

Yeah I was going to say the same. A year ago I couldn’t get any VNC to work under Wayland and gave up on the idea, nowadays just use RDP (Xrdp, Gnome RDP, etc.). I don’t usually need screen sharing specifically so RDP fits my use case perfectly.

But it’s great to see VNC catching up, more remote options are always better.

I’ve never needed to do this but have you looked into creating a Reverse SSH Tunnel? Maybe that can accomplish what you want https://www.howtogeek.com/428413/what-is-reverse-ssh-tunneling-and-how-to-use-it/

Similar to what you are trying to do - A while back when I needed to remote connect to a firewalled Windows computer I set up a reverse VNC connection on that Windows computer that would get initiated whenever I sync’d a file over to the Windows system via Dropbox/Syncthing (those work without port forwarding). Reverse VNC, like Reverse SSH or other connections basically try to initiate the connection out of the firewalled system, it’s an interesting workaround when you have no incoming port forwards. Not sure if I’d recommend that type of set up but it is more secure than sending emails so there’s that.

If you’re able to set up a mesh VPN that might work better but you do have other options if you need them.

You said you have a Framework PC, their support pages already have a list of supported Linux distributions and install guides for them

https://frame.work/linux

Yes, you can install other Linux distributions if you like and in fact most should work fine. But since you seem to be new to everything it is probably best to stick to the Linux distributions Framework themselves offer support towards.

Beyond that may just want to contact Framework support directly since you’re using their hardware.

Nouveau seems to work pretty well on Debian 13 for me, at least for standard web browser / streaming / video playback with 2160p HDR tonemapping. Back when I was using Debian 12 Nouveau would lag badly during 2160p playback so I was force to use the Nvidia driver binary at the time. But so far it’s been alright, granted I’ve not tested any gaming and perhaps that’s where Nouveau won’t do as well.

Remmina and Xrdp are probably the better RDP clients at the moment. I’ve had no problems using either to connect to Windows 10 desktops but have not tested Windows 11.

FreeRDP is used by most (all?) Linux RDP clients, it does have its own active development.

Could also try the Linux RDP client that Thincast has, still uses FreeRDP in the backend like the others but it does seem work well at least with Windows 10 (https://thincast.com/en/products/client).

Also for what it’s worth I’ve seen mention of a FreeRDP bug when the client fails to connect to Windows 11 with multi monitor enabled (since most Linux RDP clients use FreeRDP the bug affects them all too). Think the workaround for now is to disable multi-monitor in the RDP client settings before attempting to connect. Think it is getting fixed in the next FreeRDP release. No idea if that’s your issue but worth a look (e.g. https://gitlab.com/Remmina/Remmina/-/issues/3403)

Still learning this myself but I’ve found that Xrdp is Wayland compatible so there’s that if you want to remote using RDP protocol.

Gnome has its own version called Gnome Remote Desktop that is also Wayland compatible.

And for KDE its own KRdp is another RDP protocol remote server that is Wayland compatible (https://github.com/KDE/krdp). I haven’t tested the KDE version yet but I’d guess it works similarly to Gnome Remote Desktop and Xrdp, AFAIK they all use FreeRDP in the backend.

All the Linux RDP servers seem to have their own quirks but seem okay for personal day-to-day use least.

Beyond RDP solutions you could also check out stuff like RustDesk and NoMachine, they seem to be Wayland compatible as well. Though I am curious what else people use.

PS - Gave up looking for a Wayland compatible VNC, not sure if VNC will sort of die out as more and more Linux distros switch over to Wayland.

Kind of seems like an ad, every link to their site has a referral in it ( /?ref=news.itsfoss.com ), guessing itsfoss gets paid for those clicks.

Core 2 Duos are slow, yeah. I’ve got an Asus F8SP-X1 laptop from ~ 2008 with a Core 2 Duo T9500, 4 GB RAM, and a SSD SATA drive in it. It was originally a mid-range Windows Vista system. Over its years I managed to upgrade it as far as it could go. It does run standard Ubuntu and Windows 10 - Certainly not fast but it does run. Performance would lean towards unbearable without the SSD. I suspect Gnome isn’t doing it any favors and switching to a lighter DE or distro would help (or maybe just ditching the DE altogether) but since it’s just a spare laptop it’s no big deal.

One of the takeaways from your experiment is if it the system was already crap at running Windows 10 it’s not necessarily going to fare better with Linux, at least if you’re expecting a nice desktop environment. I don’t know if in 2025 we need to equate the “will this run Linux?” challenge on old Windows XP/7 hardware aside from the geek/techie users that want to do something with that old hardware. Anyone else non-technical stuck with that type of hardware isn’t thinking about Windows 10 being retired.

Sort of. Orbot is fine but for it to work it does have to modify the system’s networking. It installs itself as a VPN so if I try to use it it’ll kick me off the VPN my Android was already using. So yes Orbot can sort of let me pick apps to run over Tor but to do so it forces me off-VPN for all my other apps. Maybe that’s an Android limitation or an Orbot quirk, not really sure.

The nice thing about this new Oniux is that it works more like a container for applications rather than have to modify the system’s network.

Would be cool if this could work on Android and essentially be able to pick and choose which apps to run over Tor.