Drop VNC support from GNOME Remote Desktop in Kinetic

[Jeremy Bícha]

RDP has significantly improved privacy and performance compared to VNC.

I am struggling to find any use cases where GNOME's VNC should be preferred to RDP.

GNOME is so far unwilling to provide full VNC options in the GNOME Settings app.

The VNC feature was labeled as Legacy in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

There is value in only providing a single remote desktop method by default that works well.

gnome-remote-desktop 43 by default only builds the RDP provider and so far I haven't seen complaints about that.

Therefore, I think we should drop the VNC feature for Ubuntu 22.10.

Otherwise, we need to:
1. enable VNC in gnome-remote-desktop 43
2. Update the VNC patch in gnome-control-center 43

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-control-center - 1:43~beta-1ubuntu1

---------------
gnome-control-center (1:43~beta-1ubuntu1) kinetic; urgency=medium

  * Merge with Debian
  * Drop patches applied in new release
  * Refresh patches
  * Drop the VNC patch (LP: #1987159)

gnome-control-center (1:43~beta-1) experimental; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release
    - New Privacy > Device Security screen
    - New alert sounds
  * Drop gnome-desktop and distributor-logo patches: applied in new release
  * debian/control.in: Bump minimum libadwaita to 1.2~alpha

 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Sat, 20 Aug 2022 07:47:32 -0400

[fprietog (fprietog)]

I can't understand some decisions. IMHO this is by far the worst downgrade that a remote application can have.

Gnome way of life is Ubuntu way of die.

[Noel Grandin (noelgrandin)]

Are you insane ?

RDP flat out does not work (as in, the Windows RDP client throws an exception, and yes I reported this bug years ago, and it is still not fixed)

And some of us rely on VNC for, you know, getting actual work done.

Now I have to go through a long exercise of down-grading my machine again to get a working installation.

[Alkis Georgopoulos (alkisg)]

> I am struggling to find any use cases where GNOME's VNC should be preferred to RDP.

1) Teacher screen broadcasting to students. There, a shared VNC session is much easier to setup and performs better than separate RDP sessions. Additionally, encrypting e.g. 10 RDP streams comes with significant CPU strain, which is unnecessary in this use case.

2) The remote support use case. To help a remote user behind NAT, I only need to ask them to run `x11vnc -connect my-ip`. On my side, `vncviewer -listen` accepts the request for help.
GNOME VNC could easily support that. But there's no `xfreerdp -listen` option in the RDP protocol.
So in the RDP solution, the very frequent and significant "remote support" use case is completely ignored and we need to switch to teamviewer or anydesk instead.

It's understandable though that if upstream GNOME neglects VNC, downstream Ubuntu will also do the same. And such decisions are why there's a growing list of users that can't use GNOME at all anymore...

[Tony Pujals (tonypujals)]

All of us connecting from our macbooks really really resent this decision.

[Abram Wiebe (ethanpet113)]

> All of us connecting from our macbooks really really resent this decision.

[Abram Wiebe (ethanpet113)]

This should at the very least be a setting, or you should provide a way to hook an arbitrary screen sharing service into the control panel so a 3rd party developer can still provide an integrated interface to manage the service.