Agreed, the configuration is not pleasant. I also tried many alternatives this while abroad recently and actually found plain VNC the most performant and pleasant to use, and it's trivial to set up.
Guacamole is not intended to replace normal remote connections... It provides additional features that target people whom can't reasonably use RDP or VNC themselves ...
it provides access management so you don't need to expose the server, or the user/passwords, to gain access... You can also record the sessions ... And some other neat features... None of which really soon to replace a direct connection made by a technically savy individual between to machines on a network he controls.
But imagine the benefit for schools -- high schoolers can be given access to a virtual machine, without installing RDP or similar protocols on the students machine, and without giving them virtualization tools that might allow when to bypass student safety protections
Yep, I totally understand the value of it. I just don't recommend it for individual 'homelab' type use cases unless you really need to log in without any client.
I wanted to try all the options because there are many claims out there that they are somehow faster than VNC or other solutions due to clever protocols or compression, however I found that this wasn't really true.
it provides access management so you don't need to expose the server, or the user/passwords, to gain access... You can also record the sessions ... And some other neat features... None of which really soon to replace a direct connection made by a technically savy individual between to machines on a network he controls.
But imagine the benefit for schools -- high schoolers can be given access to a virtual machine, without installing RDP or similar protocols on the students machine, and without giving them virtualization tools that might allow when to bypass student safety protections