LinLog

I've long had both a Windows laptop and a Linux desktop on my desk.  I will occasionally have things going on both machines at the same time and want to switch back and forth between them.  I have a KVM switch for this, but I'm lazy and it's kind of annoying because it takes a few seconds for the multi-monitor setup to refresh between systems.

In the past, I dealt with this by setting up XRDP on the Linux box.  That way I can just open an RDP window and quickly check it whenever I want.  I prefer XRDP to something like VNC or TeamViewer because it's free software and requires no additional configuration once it's set up.  I don't have to install VNCviewer on Windows, I don't have to make sure that VNCserver is running on Linux - I just start the xrdp service and I'm good to go.  XRDP has it's own login manager and will start a session if one doesn't already exist.

The problem: That last part no longer works.

It's been a while since I used that setup, but I used to be able log in on the physical machine and then connect to that same session using RDP.  Turns out, you can't do that anymore.  I didn't dig into the details, but I found this GitHub issue, which pointed me to this section of the docs, which basically says, "Yeah, this doesn't really work with systemd."  Apparently, the way systemd doesn't play well with DBUS, so you can't log into an existing session that was initiated from the physical terminal.

The work-around is to log into another account.  Which is not great, but I guess it's better than nothing.  So I just created a "<mylogin>-rpd" user, added it to the same groups and my regular login, and it works reasonably well.  It's certainly not ideal, but it's easier than switching to a distro that doesn't use systemd.