Comments on Install and Use NoMachine Remote Desktop on CentOS 8

Does it also work on centos 7? Is it really free or do you need to pay for add ons?

What are alternatives to this?

Addition to the article. AFAIK Nomachine was at one time open source, but it is no longer. But it is free of use.

The software exists for a long time, and therefore I'd believe there is a working version for Centos7, if not the current one.

Alternatives would be the classics: vnc, teamviewer, ssh with x11 port forwarding, RDP depending on what you want to use it for.

NX rocks!  It feels 2-3x faster than Linux VNC or RDP solutions.  NoMachine originally created the NX protocol which is an optimized VNC + ssh tunnels that reuse ssh authentication already setup.

But the company desided to drop their F/LOSS roots and a few other projects forked the code.  Google had one. FreeNX was another, and x2go.  Google's died. FreeNX was good around 2011-ish, but x2go has continued and mostly gotten better over time.   If you want a remote desktop into a Linux system and ARE NOT using Gnome3, then x2go (a F/LOSS project) is the best of these choices.

The trick with x2go is to completely setup ssh with keybased authentication first for OSX or Linux clients into the x2go server.  Then the authentication using ssh-keys "just works."  On Windows x2go-clients, the keys created by putty don't seem to work, so we use the ssh-keygen provided with the x2go-client installer, then use the scp also included in the client install, to push the public key to the server and manually place it, set the correct permissions.  On Unix systems, that is automated by the ssh-copy-id tool.

x2go has clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux workstations.  I've seen NX clients for tablets, but never tried to use them.  All NX client/server setups don't seem to be interoperable. Booo.  NoMachine definitely got the embrace and extend down. Last time I checked, NoMachine had a 3 client limit.  x2go doesn't have any limits.  Whether anyone should support that, is a different, personal/business question. Did I mention that x2go feels 2-3x faster than Linux RDP/VNC implementations?

If on the same LAN, I much prefer to use X11 Forwarding via ssh -X.  If on the same LAN going into a KVM virtual machine and I **need** a full desktop, then the SPICE protocol is nearly native performance. SPICE is limited to KVM VMs. No other hypervisor supports it and it doesn't work on physical installs.  libvirt and virt-manager use SPICE by default.

But anyone using/accessing Linux systems really should get comfortable with ssh.  ssh is how most system-to-system secure communications are and should be handled.  NX does it.  sftp, scp, rsync, most Unix backup tools, vim, sshfs, and the list continues. If you have 2 systems and want the to access each other, transfer files, do remote file editing, run programs on the other system, locally mount the remote file system securely over the internet, then ssh should be involved.  Best of all, if you setup ssh-keys between the systems, that authentication "just works" for everything else too.

Check out x2go.  https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/download:start  Setup of x2go after ssh is setup is just a few commands.  If you know what you are doing, it is about 2 minutes to do both, with keys, on the client AND server with fail2ban to protect against bute-force attacks.  Security for x2go is dependent on security of ssh.

I guess that's enough.  ssh and x2go rock.  x2go is another stable, NX protocol, implementations. Nobody should be using RDP or VNC for the last 10 yrs or so to connect into a remote Linux system.  If you must use either of those, please, please, only allow localhost connections and force ssh-tunnels to be used.  Please.

I will prefer guacamole then all of this cause first you have more control on your system and is this being tunneled from nomachines servers?? Another thing I will not trust it for... These days security is the primary concerns for everyone I will take my 10nano seconds delay over going thought someone else's server just to remote into a gui. Second thing why gui?? Run webmin or cockpit for management... It looks like this article is for newbies and enthusiasts rather then for admins.