Manjaro was supposed to solve an issue that my Kubuntu installation had. After upgrading to 22.04 of Kubuntu the whole thing failed to connect to any remote desktop, local or remote.
I had a Manjaro install on another computer. It had no issues with its latest updates. For this reason, as well as others, some of which are philosophical, I chose to switch to Manjaro. Some of those other issues are: I’m not interested in Snaps, Appimages, or Flatpacks and don’t want Canonical dictating that I have to have Snaps. In the latest 22.04 they forced you to use a snap. They uninstalled the Firefox app and instead installed Firefox as a Snap. If you tried it you may have found that this caused Firefox to load incredibly slow.
The issue is also that it took Canonical till August to get the April release of Ubuntu stable enough to where many problems were resolved. Some still remained. We had to live with a 5 month delay for a stable release and then we had to put up with other existing issues causing canonical to keep us waiting on resolving issues that are front facing. Some of those that affected are are listed below.
Bear in mind, when I was doing the transition to Manjaro I had a lot of issues. I worked a little bit every day to move past them.
- Pithos wouldn’t install. That was in the AUR.
- ddrescue also is an issue. It would install, but ddrescue-GUI would not. I had to install it from the AUR. It still has issues with listing HDD devices.
- I also noted that the kernel Manjaro is sticking with is old.
- My ZFS volume needed to have ZFS support so I had to get that installed. Manjaro did that from the AUR, however it didn’t start the mount service and other services. I had to work that out.
- In the case of KRDC it installed the KRDC program just fine. When installing KRDC the package manager installed the VNC client along with KRDC. After some work I found that it needed xfreerdp. My other Manjaro install appeared to work so I tested to see if it was installed there. It was. I don’t recall installing it. Thus I didn’t know xfreerdp was a dependency. I installed it and then was able to connect to my “local” computers running remote desktop.
I still haven’t been able to get it to connect to the remote VPS running a windows server. Further I also found that KRDC has /media listed as the shared path, even though the /media folder doesn’t exist in a default install of Manjaro. On a different desktop when running KRDC I am able to connect to that remote VPS without issue (from the same network). I have not worked that out yet. On a third computer I also had that same issue. I have a 3rd computer that has its ups and downs with remote desktop.
There are more outstanding issues. To know that “xfreerdp” needs to be installed in conjunction with KRDC is a good thing. Further, it is important to remember that the “Shared Media” can’t be /media on a default Manjaro install. That folder doesn’t exists. If you don’t clear it or if you don’t create the folder yourself then the remote desktop won’t connect. If you want to use /media then create the folder sudo mkdir /media, or any other folder and add it to KRDC.
EDIT: 11/22/2022:
KRDC
There is more to the KRDC issue. It appears that KRDC is just a launcher for xfreerdp. It sets the parameters and launches xfreerdp based on that.
What you might see passed to launch xfreerdp is the following. You can try to launch it yourself from the command line and look for any errors:
xfreerdp /sec:rdp /v:<IP Address> /u:<username> /w:1900 /h:900
The problem is that as packages are updated so do the update requirements. In the past TLS was considered sufficient. Now it may be considered insecure. In removing TLS as a connection & security option they failed to tell the community. This is just blatant neglect. There needs to be a central clearing house for changes to important technologies and programs that the users can go to and that they can understand.
In order to overcome the issue with TLS you add the parameter /sec:rdp to the extra options in KRDC. This tells is to use the rdp security in place of the TLS security.
DDRESCUE-GUI
The issue with ddrescue-gui is with a missing file. To install it you need to issue the following command:
sudo pip install lxml
pip is python so you have to first know to install python-pip…something like sudo pamac install python-pip or sudo pamac install python3-pip. Once that is installed your ddrescue-gui will properly scan for devices.
ZFS
As far as ZFS goes when you install it under Manjaro it doesn’t start the mount service. You have to do this yourself. There are a couple other services related to zfs that have to be started by you. The problem is that you aren’t told that you need to start these services and that Manjaro doesn’t do it for you.
In my search on Reddit people stated that it doesn’t do this for you because there are several ways that you can do it. That’s a silly notion. Why make everyone do it manually when only a few people are going to do it differently than the default method found on virtually every other distribution? The majority have to suffer because there are a few that want to do it differently? They do other things for you that can be done differently by users so why do anything for us if that’s the case?