Agh, I so want this to be good. With remote desktop, I think one thing that makes a product in this area stand out is how it handles delay, packet loss and bandwidth issues. There's a ton of stuff re: adaptively changing quality and keyframe frequency, sending delta updates for parts of the screen, compressing the data, and doing all this without pegging the cpu at 100% etc etc.
Teamviewer and Nomachine NX are two examples that I use a ton that seem to have most of this stuff figured out, whereas their competitors seems to work in theory, whereas in practice they are bloated, they lag, they make my computer fan go crazy, etc.
Another thing is ease of connection through NAT/firewalls, though for that this seems to shift the burden on the server setup.
Huh. Does anybody know what the good clients use as a transport? E.g., are they UDP-based? A quick skim of the docs suggests that this only uses HTTP and Websockets, which I understand are TCP-based. The only browser thing I know of does an unreliable transport is WebRTC, but that currently isn't supported: https://glyptodon.org/jira/browse/GUAC-815
X2GO is extremely reliable for me. But speed is not good compared to teamviewer (which had a lot of stability issues on linux when I tested it 3-4 years ago)
x2go is great. I desperately want to see VirtualGL integration in it though so you can run egl compositors with local rendering (since GPUs on VMs are still uncommon).
The other thing RDP is amazing at that I haven't seen Linux do well at all is resuming local sessions remotely and vice versa - with RDP it feels integrated, with x2go you're back to just transferring frames.
pcANYWHERE for Windows had this all figured out in the late 80’s. They hooked GDI and transported the API calls wherever possible. It worked awesomely over a 56k modem. Then the guys involved sold to Symantec, and they let it go fallow, EOLing it in 2014 after 7 years of no updates.
> pcANYWHERE for Windows had this all figured out in the late 80’s. They hooked GDI and transported the API calls wherever possible.
RDP does the same; the early revs were basically GDI over wire. Later versions would have extensions/hax to transport the DirectX stuff (did they just ship framebuffers? I dunno).
Then why is it always compared favorably to X over network, which does exactly the same thing (sending graphics primitives over the network, although these days mostly having to throw over complete frame buffers because everything wants to draw itself)?
2) When times changed, RDP adapted, X did not. No one uses those old graphics primitives anymore, and X's network protocol failed to keep up with the new reality of client-side rendering. So now that protocol sucks for remoting GUIs.
Yep. For many applications, RDP on a LAN is literally indistinguishable from a local session. Sadly, nothing I've tried on the Linux desktop comes close to this performance. One of the few areas where the Linux desktop is 15 years behind.
To add to this a bit, another area where the "X ecosystem" didn't keep up is with toolkits. X11 is a very asynchronous protocol, but this is difficult to work with for toolkits so they synchronize most things, making it slow over high latency links (but unnoticeable over low latency links, like UNIX domain sockets on the local host).
Strange pcAnywhere has fallen by the wayside. That was de-facto in some support jobs I did and you could expect customers to have it for support. What do people use now if pcAnywhere is not there?
I don't do support but I did use it in non-support roles, I just can't imagine the use case nowadays.
I had the pleasure of working with the pcANYWHERE guys on interfacing their product with a product I was working on. They really loved their product and it really showed in the quality of their work. Little details like how you could hit Ctrl-Alt-Del on the remote to reboot the host. So they got fuck you money from Symantec, which I'm sure they enjoyed. But Symantec did not love the product like they did. They could have been a formidable competitor to Citrix, and look how their product line has proliferated.
About 12 years ago I deployed Windows Terminal Server in a corporate environment, and used PXE boot on the client computers to start a basic Linux distro that then launched the 2X client to access TS. Right now I'm creating a reference document for a VDI deployment using VMware/Citrix/TS. I've briefly looked at the NoMachine client by installing it to a Win10 computer, and the performance of NoMachine is worse than RDP to the same computer over the same link. Since you're happy with NoMahchine do you know of any optimization techniques for it?
Hmm - I haven't really administered Nomachine myself (we have an enterprise installation on one of the clusters at work), so I can't really help you there unfortunately, but only to say that it doesn't often crash or hang for me, and the delay is quite low enough over wan that using the GUI / mouse works almost perfectly, both on OSX and windows.
RDP is pretty darn fast (at least when I last used it ~10y ago)
I think the attraction to NX for linux users is that it is still way better than VNC.. and both of which are pretty much the only consistently functioning / packaged server options for most distros without fiddling..
I've been a nomachine fan for a few years now, use it to access my linux work laptop from my windows gaming desktop. It has some minor irritations but on the whole it handles this use case quite well. I'll definitely be giving guacamole a shot though.
Teradici PCoIP is proprietary, but absolutely, amazingly good. It is licensed by various thin client and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure products, like AWS WorkSpaces. RDP is also really effective.
I use both, but Teradici is the one that made me abandon my local Windows VMs.
Any HN'ers happen to use Guacamole in order to gain access to Linux hosts (via SSH, of course) from an iPad? I'd be interested in hearing about how it works.
Alternatively, I'd take recommendations for an SSH client for the iPad that supports public/private key pairs and connecting through a bastion/jumpbox/etc. (a.k.a. the "ProxyCommand" SSH client directive).
Since we're nitpicking: 2012-2014 can potentially be three years. The definition for "several" is relatively flexible since it's an approximate quantity. However what is agreed upon is that it has to be at least more than a couple, which three is.
Great tool indeed. To be honest even web browsing works just fine with it, as long as there is no animations to display.
I use it to get around my firewall at work, which seem to block anything apart http/https. If anyone knows a better solution than guacamole, let me know :)
We use Guacamole at work to give our customers access to the internally-hosted web app we're developing for them. I've been kind of amazed that it works as well as it does.
I’ve yet to find a good solution for remoting to a Mac from a Windows machine. Chrome Remote Desktop almost fits the bill, but I cannot get meta key bindings to work properly.
Also a "good" solution to me means the connection is established via some cloud mechanism, and doesn't require me to open a bunch of ports on my firewall.
And VNC on Mac has always had miserable usability for me - updates paint slowly from the top to the bottom of the screen, can't see my text in real time when I type.
The demo is a little weird. They open up VLC on Windows, but only to show off how it renders waveforms for an MP3. Is that a use case that people have for remoting into their PC?
They're demonstrating Guacamole's ability to handle simple animations smoothly. Music visualizers are a solid, familiar example, despite not being a super-common use case for remote desktop.
In my experience, Guacamole works very well with windows RDP servers, and feels very fast. Certainly faster than X11 or VNC remoting on the same hardware.
Shameless plug -- founder of https://commando.io here. We offer a product similar to Guacamole (agentless/clientless) SSH access to machines which is web based. We unfortunately only support SSH though. We have an iOS app as well so you can execute commands on servers on the go or from bed -- BedOps :-).
Beautiful! I've been looking for something like this and hadn't heard of Guacamole.
Where I work, it's standard for developers to work using a "cloud desktop", i.e., a remote machine hosted in the cloud that's used for personal development with a very production-like environment [1]. When accompanied by a powerful laptop it's all most engineers need. However, client and server software for various protocols like RDP and VNC on various platforms is still a pain. It'd be great to have a simple and easy way to provide viable remote access built directly into servers -- from any client device with no prior setup. I'm glad to have come across this.
I'm curious how Guacamole's HTML5 rendering compares to solutions like the Ace editor when used to render terminals and text areas. At a high level, it looks like Guacamole is based on RealMint which uses the HTML5 canvas tag, whereas Ace manipulates regular text elements to effect styling. I'll have to experiment with them.
[1] And for that reason I was amused to see the following on the Guacamole home page: "Keep your desktop in the cloud: Desktops accessed through Guacamole need not physically exist. With both Guacamole and a desktop operating system hosted in the cloud, you can combine the convenience of Guacamole with the resilience and flexibility of cloud computing."
> it's standard for developers to work using a "cloud desktop"
Personally I prefer something like Apple's iCloud Drive; your files are downloaded locally and made available offline, letting you work on them with any device, even after it's disconnected from the Internet.
This lets my data stay mine, encrypted on my local storage, individually manageable and tag-able like all regular files, included in Time Machine etc. backups, and available even if iCloud Drive goes down.
For example, although you cannot compile full Xcode projects on iPads (yet), I can take code from them, edit it in Swift Playgrounds on my iPad, and copy it back into iCloud Drive for continuing on my iMac.
Edit: That is not to say having access to a full desktop system from any device isn't desirable, but I do prefer my files to remain available on local storage.
I want to know more about your 'cloud desktop' setup. I have tried to do it myself but it's quite laggy (like heavy lag in typing code, scrolling content). I wonder how you guys solve that.
I know Ace-like editor works great but it's usually a minimal web editor compared to something like Sublime running on vnc/rdp.
One solution for remote development is to handle some heavy lifting like responsive display logic locally in the client. For two examples of this pattern, see Cloud9 IDE [1] (which builds on Ace) and Eclipse Che [2] (which uses the Orion editor). They're web-based IDEs that run remotely on the server, but load the content, such as the file tree and files you've opened, locally into your browser. So you can load your session from anywhere and no permanent state is kept on the client.
As far as protocols like RDP and NX go, I don't know of a silver bullet. I use machines hosted in Portland from my location in Seattle and the latency is low enough that remote UIs feel close to native. Some protocols are better than others at handling high-latency connections or low-bandwidth connections. I'd recommend testing a few and see what works best for your environment. You might also measure the round trip time: for any protocol that needs a round-trip with the server to update the display, the RTT will fundamentally bound the UI's responsiveness - to do better you have to load some display logic onto the client. Scrolling and character echo are two examples of logic that's really valuable to have on the client. (Many SSH clients have local predictive echo for that reason; they echo by default except when they've detected a password prompt)
I should clarify though that a lot of development takes place on a person's local laptop, synchronizing between that and the cloud desktop (such as with Git and other tools). The former provides responsiveness and the user's preferred OS and tools, while the latter provides a production-like OS with high performance that is better able to handle complex software stacks like multi-microservice applications or sizable ecommerce websites. It's also convenient to have a relatively pristine environment that isn't frequently interrupted by e.g. laptop hibernation and network changes.
> One solution for remote development is to handle some heavy lifting like responsive display logic locally in the client.
Another example is emacs in server mode: although normally folks use a Unix socket, it's possible to use a network socket instead. The remote emacs actually contains all the state, and the local emacsclient just connects to it.
Another approach is to run emacs locally, and access remote files & commands with TRAMP.
I tend to use Amazon Workspaces for this. It's a joy to work with(especially now it supports two screens). Having a desktop that is exactly the same wherever I am doesn't sound like much but is one of those small things that you really miss when it's gone. I'm not aware of any other providers, though I'm sure there are 1000s. One nice advantage of Workspaces is that it integrates with Amazon AD out of the box.
There are surprisingly few providers, and AWS WorkSpaces is unusual in that it has no minimum number of desktops. One gotcha with WorkSpaces: it is cheap enough to make sense for just one user if you the free "Simple" AD option, but "Full" AD with GPO support etc. does add a cost (though not a significant one for a business).
I worked at a big hardware chip company 10~12 years ago and we also had a similar setup; except that the "cloud desktop" wasn't really a personal one, it's shared among the team. Whoever needs to do tasks that need the powerful machine to run will Remote Desktop into it; other than that normally you use the company laptop (which is pretty powerful for its time too). I don't remember having a lot of pain with Remote Desktop or VNC at the time; but the web client would certainly be cooler.
We had a project that can control qemu, xen, vmware and hyperv, Guacomole handled them all, and we integrated it easily, it supports both websockets and regular http polling, both works fast enough and nice
I wish I had this years ago. To do VNC and get around firewall/NAT issues I actually created port forwarder through Firebase. It surprisingly worked great https://github.com/rb365/fireport
I might try to make it work with Guacamole, web UI is definitely better than installing VNC client.
I was making a cloud product a number of years back and wrote a similar product for my then employer. For VNC and SSH it's pretty easy to do in Javascript and can be quite reliable (much more so than telling customers how to connect using their own software - big difference in support). Even full-screen games were doable.
It provided something similar to phpvirtualbox + a screen where you'd (if properly authenticaed) just get access to your virtual machines just by going to a particular tab. Had a list of your VMs on the left, click on one, and a javascript starts up and gets a VNC javascript (started out with flash, swapped it out for a javascript one)
That said, this doesn't work as well as people here want it to. There is a significant cost to running in the browser (keyboard for instance, pressing CTRL-W will definitely generate a "wtf" moment a few times). But the speed and the fact that I couldn't do significant protocol development (VNC has something like 7 variations on protocol, integrating those into websocket is more than just encapsulating them if you want it to work well), means that I couldn't use the most efficient protocols. This meant that effectively there were resolution limits that weren't too high.
Lastly, javascript adds (a lot) of latency. It isn't much, and it sort of stays below 200 msec or so. But you'd be surprised how incredibly irritating it is to work with just 20msec extra latency. It's barely tolerable. For server admin work, sure (even then it's irritating). For constant development work, it's very irritating.
And full-screen games were doable because generally they would lower resolution and have other sources of lag. So they actually worked better than things like Eclipse and Visual Studio. Also they make you much less likely to hit browser keys. Especially old full screen games worked really well.
I've had a very positive experience with wetty[0] which uses the ChromeOS terminal emulator (hterm) on the client side, and communicates via websocket to a small node server that makes the SSH connection. I use it to provide a shell into an internal docker container used for managing some things. Everything "just works," even tmux key bindings.
You'd be really surprised how low you can get it, in one of my open source projects we have JPEG streaming and GPU accelerated capturing producing results as low as 50ms: https://github.com/Ulterius/server
You can hack around this by grabbing the "window.onbeforeunload" event to display the "Changes you have made to this page may not be saved: Leave/Stay" dialog when closing a tab. Reddit implements this when you're writing a comment, HN does not.
The nice thing about a remote desktop, though, is that you won't actually lose changes.
The problem with this proposal is that it only works with full-screen applications. Want to have multiple tabs open to many different desktops? Forget it. Ctrl-w will screw you.
Browsers already have an API for overriding built-in keyboard shortcuts: Event.preventDefault(). It's just that browser makers have chosen to ignore it for certain special keys like Ctrl-t and Ctrl-w.
If a server can be likened to an avocado, this enables people to expose its insides by removing the hardened outer layer, then trash the kernel and mash the rest to a pulp?
Please don't use vimeo, it's terrible for people with slow connections (no 144p) and for people with fast connection there is no 2x speed mode to save time. Use Youtube or a service with similar feature.
Also, the video is mp4 w/out fallback which doesn't work for those of us who compile our browsers w/out proprietary codecs/containers (admittedly pedantic and only applies to 0.0001%, but it applied to me).
Like all Apache projects it seems like it's very well documented for engineers who work with it, but not really explained for newcomers :)
Does it log in into its own session or takes control over an active session on the machine?
My use case is this - My parent is using Ubuntu and in case she reports a problem, I'd like to be able to log into her session, share control over the mouse pointer so that she can show me what she's doing and I can also navigate around to uncheck the checkbox or sth like that.
Is Guacamole the right solution? If not, anyone knows a good one?
That's entirely down to configuration on the target. Guacamole is just an in browser client, so it depends how the server is set up.
For VNC, if your server is set up using X11VNC then you will be logging into the existing session, whereas if you set it up it TightVNC or Vnc4Server (can't remember what's in the Ubuntu repos) then it will be a separate session.
Open-source solutions for things like this are generally developed as infrastructure, or a basis for future work. Proprietary solutions are built for people to actually use.
I second TeamViewer, really like it and works across Windows, Linux and Mac.
I had a lot of trouble getting TeamViewer to install on my cloud VMs. It needs a physical desktop or something close to it. On DigitalOcean and Scaleway, this didn't work. On Vultr and Linode, it works fine.
Searching for guacamole on github combined with recently updated shows a lot of unrelated repos. Apparently there is a github tutorial which uses a guacamole recipe, which makes searching for related things hard. I was trying to find an updated docker image for example.
222 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadTeamviewer and Nomachine NX are two examples that I use a ton that seem to have most of this stuff figured out, whereas their competitors seems to work in theory, whereas in practice they are bloated, they lag, they make my computer fan go crazy, etc.
Another thing is ease of connection through NAT/firewalls, though for that this seems to shift the burden on the server setup.
About NAT/firewall zerotier[3] solves most of my issues.
[1] https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php
[2] http://winswitch.org/
[3] https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne
The other thing RDP is amazing at that I haven't seen Linux do well at all is resuming local sessions remotely and vice versa - with RDP it feels integrated, with x2go you're back to just transferring frames.
RDP does the same; the early revs were basically GDI over wire. Later versions would have extensions/hax to transport the DirectX stuff (did they just ship framebuffers? I dunno).
2) When times changed, RDP adapted, X did not. No one uses those old graphics primitives anymore, and X's network protocol failed to keep up with the new reality of client-side rendering. So now that protocol sucks for remoting GUIs.
I don't do support but I did use it in non-support roles, I just can't imagine the use case nowadays.
I think the attraction to NX for linux users is that it is still way better than VNC.. and both of which are pretty much the only consistently functioning / packaged server options for most distros without fiddling..
I use both, but Teradici is the one that made me abandon my local Windows VMs.
Minor grammatical note: "e.g." means "for example", so the phrase "for e.g." does not make sense. I used to make the same mistake quite a bit!
e.g., with some additional punctuation:
I like to run for the bus.
I like to run for, for example, buses, cars and airplanes.
I like to run for e.g. buses, cars and airplanes.
A little tortured but possibly valid.
Alternatively, I'd take recommendations for an SSH client for the iPad that supports public/private key pairs and connecting through a bastion/jumpbox/etc. (a.k.a. the "ProxyCommand" SSH client directive).
I used Guacamole + a 1st gen Chromebook as my laptop for several years of college work in 2012-2014.
Tasks that worked well:
- writing code in IntelliJ
- editing in Adobe Illustrator
- working in the terminal
- basic CAD in Sketchup
Tasks that I’d wait to do at home on my desktop:
- drawing, especially in Photoshop
- 3D work in Maya
- sound-latency sensitive work like MAX
So I'd argue the GP's post is valid as it is.
I use it to get around my firewall at work, which seem to block anything apart http/https. If anyone knows a better solution than guacamole, let me know :)
I used it for years with only a 1mb uplink, although I now have 10mb.
Quite interested to hear more about your use case. Does it simplify access control? Is it just for accessing over HTTP, or e.g. over SSH?
I will give this a try. Hoping it is good.
And VNC on Mac has always had miserable usability for me - updates paint slowly from the top to the bottom of the screen, can't see my text in real time when I type.
Your remote <———> guacd (RDP)
guacd <———> the browser (custom protocol)
In my experience, Guacamole works very well with windows RDP servers, and feels very fast. Certainly faster than X11 or VNC remoting on the same hardware.
Here's a walk-through from a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/4vdujw/guacamole_f...
Where I work, it's standard for developers to work using a "cloud desktop", i.e., a remote machine hosted in the cloud that's used for personal development with a very production-like environment [1]. When accompanied by a powerful laptop it's all most engineers need. However, client and server software for various protocols like RDP and VNC on various platforms is still a pain. It'd be great to have a simple and easy way to provide viable remote access built directly into servers -- from any client device with no prior setup. I'm glad to have come across this.
I'm curious how Guacamole's HTML5 rendering compares to solutions like the Ace editor when used to render terminals and text areas. At a high level, it looks like Guacamole is based on RealMint which uses the HTML5 canvas tag, whereas Ace manipulates regular text elements to effect styling. I'll have to experiment with them.
[1] And for that reason I was amused to see the following on the Guacamole home page: "Keep your desktop in the cloud: Desktops accessed through Guacamole need not physically exist. With both Guacamole and a desktop operating system hosted in the cloud, you can combine the convenience of Guacamole with the resilience and flexibility of cloud computing."
Personally I prefer something like Apple's iCloud Drive; your files are downloaded locally and made available offline, letting you work on them with any device, even after it's disconnected from the Internet.
This lets my data stay mine, encrypted on my local storage, individually manageable and tag-able like all regular files, included in Time Machine etc. backups, and available even if iCloud Drive goes down.
For example, although you cannot compile full Xcode projects on iPads (yet), I can take code from them, edit it in Swift Playgrounds on my iPad, and copy it back into iCloud Drive for continuing on my iMac.
I know Ace-like editor works great but it's usually a minimal web editor compared to something like Sublime running on vnc/rdp.
As far as protocols like RDP and NX go, I don't know of a silver bullet. I use machines hosted in Portland from my location in Seattle and the latency is low enough that remote UIs feel close to native. Some protocols are better than others at handling high-latency connections or low-bandwidth connections. I'd recommend testing a few and see what works best for your environment. You might also measure the round trip time: for any protocol that needs a round-trip with the server to update the display, the RTT will fundamentally bound the UI's responsiveness - to do better you have to load some display logic onto the client. Scrolling and character echo are two examples of logic that's really valuable to have on the client. (Many SSH clients have local predictive echo for that reason; they echo by default except when they've detected a password prompt)
I should clarify though that a lot of development takes place on a person's local laptop, synchronizing between that and the cloud desktop (such as with Git and other tools). The former provides responsiveness and the user's preferred OS and tools, while the latter provides a production-like OS with high performance that is better able to handle complex software stacks like multi-microservice applications or sizable ecommerce websites. It's also convenient to have a relatively pristine environment that isn't frequently interrupted by e.g. laptop hibernation and network changes.
[1] https://c9.io
[2] https://www.eclipse.org/che/
Another example is emacs in server mode: although normally folks use a Unix socket, it's possible to use a network socket instead. The remote emacs actually contains all the state, and the local emacsclient just connects to it.
Another approach is to run emacs locally, and access remote files & commands with TRAMP.
https://github.com/edoceo/guacamole-auth-http
I might try to make it work with Guacamole, web UI is definitely better than installing VNC client.
This is one of them.
It provided something similar to phpvirtualbox + a screen where you'd (if properly authenticaed) just get access to your virtual machines just by going to a particular tab. Had a list of your VMs on the left, click on one, and a javascript starts up and gets a VNC javascript (started out with flash, swapped it out for a javascript one)
That said, this doesn't work as well as people here want it to. There is a significant cost to running in the browser (keyboard for instance, pressing CTRL-W will definitely generate a "wtf" moment a few times). But the speed and the fact that I couldn't do significant protocol development (VNC has something like 7 variations on protocol, integrating those into websocket is more than just encapsulating them if you want it to work well), means that I couldn't use the most efficient protocols. This meant that effectively there were resolution limits that weren't too high.
Lastly, javascript adds (a lot) of latency. It isn't much, and it sort of stays below 200 msec or so. But you'd be surprised how incredibly irritating it is to work with just 20msec extra latency. It's barely tolerable. For server admin work, sure (even then it's irritating). For constant development work, it's very irritating.
And full-screen games were doable because generally they would lower resolution and have other sources of lag. So they actually worked better than things like Eclipse and Visual Studio. Also they make you much less likely to hit browser keys. Especially old full screen games worked really well.
- https://github.com/billchurch/WebSSH2
[0] https://github.com/krishnasrinivas/wetty
It can even display images in your browser if you do something like, 'cat someimage.jpeg'
(I wrote it)
In my current active project we have real-time streaming (< 10ms) working just fine in Chrome and Firefox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYRBRzevRDw
FYI, a fix for that is coming soon: https://w3c.github.io/keyboard-lock/
The nice thing about a remote desktop, though, is that you won't actually lose changes.
Browsers already have an API for overriding built-in keyboard shortcuts: Event.preventDefault(). It's just that browser makers have chosen to ignore it for certain special keys like Ctrl-t and Ctrl-w.
•Enabling Duo Dual / Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for Guacamole Docker
https://www.cb-net.co.uk/linux/enabling-duo-dual-multi-facto...
•Using Let’s Encrypt with an NGINX Docker Container (plus bye-bye StartSSL!)
https://www.cb-net.co.uk/linux/using-lets-encrypt-with-an-ng...
Though it does seem they started letting video game captures again, they still have the "creative expression" language.
https://vimeo.com/blog/post/new-upload-rules
Source?
Does it log in into its own session or takes control over an active session on the machine?
My use case is this - My parent is using Ubuntu and in case she reports a problem, I'd like to be able to log into her session, share control over the mouse pointer so that she can show me what she's doing and I can also navigate around to uncheck the checkbox or sth like that.
Is Guacamole the right solution? If not, anyone knows a good one?
For VNC, if your server is set up using X11VNC then you will be logging into the existing session, whereas if you set it up it TightVNC or Vnc4Server (can't remember what's in the Ubuntu repos) then it will be a separate session.
The target machine is Ubuntu 17.10 on Wayland. Not sure if X11VNC will work with that :(
Open-source solutions for things like this are generally developed as infrastructure, or a basis for future work. Proprietary solutions are built for people to actually use.
- Does not work on Ubuntu - Would not solve this issue - Needs a special licence to allow multiple users to connect simultaneously
I had a lot of trouble getting TeamViewer to install on my cloud VMs. It needs a physical desktop or something close to it. On DigitalOcean and Scaleway, this didn't work. On Vultr and Linode, it works fine.
"guacamole docker" returns a whole page of helpful resources (github, dockerhub etc)