Desktop solutions for a self-hosted environment - eviltoast

Hi everyone

I’ve got a capable Ubuntu server hosting Docker, using Portainer to manage many stacks and containers. I’m about to add a couple machines to a swarm for a little fault-tolerance.

Before this, Docker was Windows hosted which gave me a useful addition; a handy remote desktop for those times when I wanted to do something remotely using a GUI at home.

https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/rdesktop seems to work OK but I wondered if the community here have any suggested alternatives. Instead of running within Docker, has anyone simply installed a GUI on the Ubuntu host?

Thanks in advance for your input.

  • Sim@lemmy.nzOP
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    1 year ago

    I want my server to host a desktop that I can use remotely. Not for managing the server itself; like you describe, I use common tools for managing it.

    I just need a desktop for a while - sometimes I want to work on a machine that’s not the one I’m physically using. At the moment I simply have an old desktop running Windows; I VPN to home and RDP to to the machine which works very well, but it seems a waste to have a machine running for this purpose only. I could add the machine to the swarm if I could host a desktop in Docker but that’s not really the intent of Docker and doesn’t yield great results.

    • constantokra@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      In that case, use linuxserver’s webtop container. I use one for exactly that. Runs in a browser. I mounted the home directory to a folder so it keeps any files and settings I have, but I haven’t mounted anything else to a volume, so whenever I restart the container it’s fresh. Makes it really easy to try out software or configurations.