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Desktop solutions for a self-hosted environment (lemmy.nz)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

What are you trying to do? Don't take this the wrong way, but I can't imagine anything i'd do on a server where i'd want a GUI.

Even where I could imagine it, there are other options. If you want a graphical file manager, run one in docker or use sshfs to mount it whenever you want. Change config files? Vim. Or nano or whatever if you hate vim. Or spin up a full coding environment whenever you need it and mount in your config files. Just don't leave it running and don't expose it. If you just need a linux desktop for a while, and it's not actually for your server, install a linuxserver.io webtop.

What are you trying to do?

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years 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.

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