[genewitch]

Well, i buried the lede. you need windows server to do it easily; once you have windows server set up, you need terminal services to be enabled and installed for that server. Then you can set up "single application mode" application. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...

I didn't really need a guide, it's pretty straightforward; we ran firefox on a windows server VM in AWS and watched youtube videos, in 2009, just to prove it could be done. We offered thin client conversions to companies. never had any clients, too early, i guess, and everything went to cellphones instead. When i say we watched youtube videos, i mean on our test computer in front of us there was a firefox icon on the windows desktop local, and double clicking it, after a few seconds, would launch a firefox window, but instead of the firefox icon it would be the mstsc.exe icon, and you were not looking at an executable's output on your screen, you were looking at the output of the executable in the cloud.

anyhow the windows server software takes care of bundling/packaging/deploying of the the little "scripts" that let you have a desktop icon and everything else. I think there's a wizard.

edit: i buried another lede. The video quality of youtube over terminal services in 2009 with our crappy dsl was... "talking head" - or as i like to call it "peak apple quicktime video circa 1996" - approx. 15fps

[alchemist1e9]

Thank you for these details.

When I looked into doing it once on a modern system and stopped when window server entered the story. I’ve been hoping there might be a simple solution but that had me stumble upon Parallels RAS which I’ve been considering doing an evaluation of.

https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se...

My primary battlestation system (not gaming but for business) is 8X4k monitors on a custom Linux system driven by 2 high end GPUs. What I’d ideally like to have is many Win11 pro application windows managed by my X11 windows manager.

[genewitch]

looks like microsoft has jumped into this area since i last looked (eesh, 16 years ago is what i was basing my info on!): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/... https://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/technet/download...

so it looks like, in addition to the method i mentioned, you can also virtualize the applications within "App-V" which is like hyper-v for apps (is anyone catching all of this? is this thing on?).

Microsoft made a firecracker or whatever for windows apps and no one told me?

edit: i'm shocked there's not a kitsch-y name for this like "Windowless Office Suite" for on-prem office that's virtualized for app-v... Someone at microsoft should pay me if they use this.

[alchemist1e9]

Quick skim seems to suggest the client to that system is Windows only.

I’m hoping for a Linux client which apparently the commercial Parallels RAS provides.

I think MacOS is even more hopeless than Windows for a per window or seamless remote GUI application solution. For Linux I use Xpra which honestly with GPU server and client acceleration can feel like magic. The dream for me would be a Linux based system for display using an X11 window manager to manage remote GUI application windows from all 3 platforms from multiple systems, all GPU accelerated on both ends.

Apple seems to have a particular hatred for the idea of anyone using their OS remotely for whatever reason, though Parsec works quite well for me, though I’ve heard there is a sunshine+moonlight approach that does even better than Parsec …

[genewitch]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-using-seamless-rd...

rdesktop has a "-A" flag for seamless mode which looks like it does what you want. I'm telling you we had that working 16 years ago via AWS - the AWS side was running windows but there wasn't any reason we had to be [running windows] on the client side. I merely mentioned that microsoft apparently didn't rest on their laurels with msts, they now support even more thin client mechanisms.