I finally tried a trial of Remotix which costs $39 and uses the VNC protocol, yet for some reason it's enormously faster when connecting to OS X's built-in VNC server (known as 'Screen Sharing' in system settings) than any of the other clients. UltraVNC was the fastest of the lot if set to 'Ultra' speed on a LAN but drawing menus would still stall for up to 5 seconds and it has zero support for sending Cmd key. I've tried all the free VNC clients: RealVNC, TightVNC, TigerVNC, UltraVNC, and TurboVNC and they are all laggy in various places, even on a LAN, and each has various problems with transmitting system keys, especially Cmd-Tab. So far, I have resisted paying Aqua $249 knowing that their software may become useless with a future macOS update and they might not fix it for 1+ years again.

iRapp had OS X El Capitan support a few months after it was released, but when I asked for a trial license from Aqua they said Aqua is still a week or more out from having a beta with support for El Capitan (and this was over a year after EC was released!). Aqua is supposedly faster (they've improved on the RDP protocol and call it AAP) but unfortunately they are slow in development. In fact, Aqua was first with RDP and they sued iRapp for reverse engineering their product, but lost the case. Even a trial license I had a copy of wouldn't install without their license server being up.Īfter some research, I found that Aqua Connect is the only iRapp competitor around that offers an OS X RDP server. As of around my license for iRapp server said it was blocked because it couldn't contact the license server and I could find no way to get it working again. I think taking inspiration from the current Microsoft apps, (especially Microsoft Remote Desktop, which also works on Macs), would be a good idea.IRapp was my favorite fast screen sharing server for OS X, but they went bankrupt around June 2016 and their license server was taken down at some point. I don't think it would be necessary to have parameter settings per remote host. I would like to suggest Rustdesk to allow the user to configure RDP to use either RDC or MRD and set parameters for each protocol. I, for one, can't use it because my laptop has a very HiDPI resolution and on the remote host everything looks tiny, the window is tiny too and it's basically useless as it is now. The best feature of MRD is it will allow resizing the remote desktop to the client's windows size to always be pixel-perfect at the same DPI as the client and with no scroll bars.Īt the moment, Rustdesk seems to be using RDC, but with hardcoded parameters. The main advantage for RDC is it can handle multiple monitors.

Microsoft Remote Desktop, which can be installed from the Microsoft Store (or the AppStore in Mac computers).

The good old Remote Desktop Connection, which is part of Windows.

RDP can be used on Windows via two applications:

Mac remote desktop client