If you are a Linux user and you find yourself in need to connect to a remote Windows server desktop, I hereby recommend that you give Remmina a try.

At my new job I have to check into Windows servers at times (eh, I know, it’s a cruel world…) through the RDP protocol. We have some tooling available that, given the name of a VM, will look up from various sources all information necessary to connect to that machine and build a Remote Desktop Connection file (“.rdp”). The problem: Vinagre, the standard GNOME RDP client, doesn’t know what to do with that file, so I had to find another client.

Enter Remmina.

Remmina is a remote desktop client written in C and using the GTK library, which makes it integrate very well with GNOME, but is also suitable for use in other graphical environments. It comes with a host of features, both native and through plugins. It supports several protocols, among which RDP, and supports RDP connection files, too! In fact, it’s now the default remote desktop client on my work laptop.

So far, the only defect I encountered is the interface, rather spartan. It’s probably a sign of a development team that is more focused on the technical features (and very, very strong in that respect) and less on the user interface — which is not necessarily a bad thing: if there is a choice to be made between solid features and the user interface, I tend to prefer the former… as long as the user interface is usable, that is 🙂