xrdp – New releases made available recently (v0.9.27/0.10.5)

Griffon

Hello World, 

Neutrinolabs, the team behind xrdp and xorgxrdp package, has made a some new releases available.  We can see that the project is still active and release on regular base updates on their software solution.  However, it is important to note and emphasize that xrdp solution requires still X11 Display server.   There is at this stage no support for the Wayland Display Server.  We can see that some discussions and work has started to see if this can be tackled but at this stage,  we have not seen anything that could be used in production environement.

Since we have developed a small script utility used to simplify xrdp installation from source code, we are trying to catch up with the release cycle of the product and we are trying to update as required our little xrdp-installer script.  

The team has published a bunch of new releases in End of January 2026. So, let’s have a look at what’s new here and what’s missing….

Overview

xRDP is a software package that provide remote desktop capabilities against a Linux machine and mimics the Remote Desktop capabilities that can be found in Windows Operating system.  Using xRDP, you can basically use your standard remote desktop client on Windows or Linux and you can remotely access your Linux Desktop interface.   The team behind the software is releasing on regular basis updates. These updates can introduces new features and/or can address security issues. 

You can find the latest releases & release notes for the xrdp package by visiting this page 

If you are using xrdp for a long time or if you are using our little xrdp-installer script, you will probably know that the xrdp package works on X11 Display server and that at this moment, Wayland support is not there.  So, do not try to run the xrdp software package on any distribution using exclusively Wayland Desktop interface (i.e. Gnome 49 and higher) 

New xRDP releases  

xrdp packages has actually 2 branches available.  You have the branch 0.9.x which is end of life and you have the Branch 0.10.x which is where the team is putting most of their efforts nowadays. 

Release Version 0.9.27 

On January 28, 2026,  a new  package version has been released on the end of life branch.  Based on the announcement on their release page, “xrdp v0.9.x is end-of-life. New releases may happen when severe security vulnerabilities or critical bugs are found.”  xrdp version 0.9.27 is about fixing some security issues which are the following 

There is also a minor bug fix related to the xrdp man page which has been updated

No real new feature are actually included and this release is really to ensure that the xrdp package branch 0.9.x can still be used safely.  If you are still using this version, it might be time to upgrade to a most recent version 

Release Version 0.10.5

The latest and greatest version of xRDP is set to 0.10.5 .  This package has been released a few days ago (January 27, 2026).  Looking at the release page for this version, there some changes introduced in this version and they also fix a security issue that has been detected. 

Security fixes 

Like the version 0.9.27 a security issue has been detected and this release fixes this issue specifically 

Bug fixes & New features

Based on the release page, we can list below the new features included in this release

    • It is now possible to start the xrdp daemon entirely unprivileged from the service manager (#3599 #3603). If you do this certain restrictions will apply. See https://github.com/neutrinolabs/xrdp/wiki/Running-the-xrdp-process-as-non-root for details.
    • TLS pre-master secrets can now be recorded for packet captures (#3617)
    • Add a FuseRootReportMaxFree to work around ‘no free space’ issues with some file managers (#3639)
    • Alternate shell names can now be passed to startwm.sh in an environment variable for more system management control (#3624 #3651)
    • Updated Xorg paths in sesman.ini to include more recent distros (#3663)
    • Add Slovenian keyboard (#3668 #3670)
    • xrdpapi: Add a way to monitor connect/disconnect events (#3693)

The section below also provide the list of bugs that have been fixed with this release. 

    • Allow an empty X11 UTF8_STRING to be pasted to the clipboard (#3580 #3582)
    • Fix a regression introduced in v0.10.x, where it became impossible to connect to a VNC server which did not support the ExtendedDesktopSize encoding (#3540 #3584)
    • Fix a regression introduced in v0.10.x related to PAM groups handling (#3594)
    • Inconsistencies with [MS-RDPBCGR] have been addressed (#3608)
    • A reference to uninitialised data within the verify_user_pam_userpass.c module has been fixed (#3638)
    • Prevent some possible crashes when the RFX encoder is resized (#3590 #3644)
    • Fixes a regression introduced by GFX development which prevented the JPEG encoder from working correctly (#3649)
    • Fixes a regression introduced by #2974 which resulted in the xrdp PID file being deleted unexpectedly (#3650)
    • Do not overwrite a VNC port set by the user when not using sesman (#3674)
    • Fix regression from 0.9.x when freerdp client uses /workarea (#3618 #3676)
    • Fixes a crash where a resize is attempted with drdynvc disabled (#3672 #3680)
    • getgrouplist() now compiles on MacOS (#3575)
    • Various Coverity warnings have been addressed (#3656)
    • Documentation improvements (#3665)

You can obtain detailed information about these features and bug fixes directly from their release page (see https://github.com/neutrinolabs/xrdp/releases/tag/v0.10.5)

New xorgxrdp release

Release Version 0.10.5

The xrdp team has also released  on January 26, 2026, the latest version of xorgxrdp package. This release fixes a small bug but does not bring really any new features or improvements.   Based on the info on the release page, this version should be used together with xrdp v0.10.5 or later. 

Wayland Support ? Not yet ! 

Like with previous releases, xRDP still does not support Wayland Display Server and still relies on the aged Xorg Display Server.   More and more distribution are shipping with Wayland Display server as default one.  More and more releases remove X11 dependencies from their distributions.  Gnome Desktop are removing any reference to X11.  Ubuntu 25.10 with Gnome is solely using Wayland layer and if you try to install xrdp and access your Ubuntu 25.10 Desktop, it will simply fails.  Other Desktop community (i.e. KDE) has also announce that Desktop will be only supporting Wayland in the near future

The team behind the xRDP package has started looking at supporting Wayland Display server and some work is ongoing.  However, migrating from X11 to Wayland is bringing a lot of challenges as we can see from the discussion in their Github repo.   We have no idea when a xRDP  package including Wayland support will be made available.  This means that maybe there will be a need to find another solution to perform your remote connection against Linux machine.

What’s the impact for me ?

You will need to check which Desktop interface your Linux Distribution is using. If you are using Gnome Desktop on Ubuntu 25.10, xRDP will not be working and adding any additional x11 package will not solve your issue.  The X11 support has been removed completely.  If you are using a distribution shipping with KDE or XFCE,  you might still be able to use xrdp package as long as the necessary X11 package can be installed and allows interaction with the Login manager.  

For Distributions shipping with recent Gnome Desktop interface, you can use the out of the box software solution.  The Gnome Remote Desktop is available since Gnome Desktop 46.  A lot of people think that gnome remote desktop is like the sharing desktop feature and someone needs to be logged on before you can make the remote connection.  This is not correct.  The Gnome Remote desktop is really a replacement/alternative to xrdp and even if no one is logged on on the computer, it will be possible to remote connect and access the desktop interface.

Using gnome Remote Desktop, you will be able to perform a remote desktop session while using the Wayland Display Server.    The built-int solution offers 

  • RDP protocol support
  • Redirect sound
  • Reconnect to existing session
  • multi-user support 
  • Clipboard support  

If you want to see how gnome remote desktop utility is working, you can have a look at this old post (Testing Gnome 46 Remote Login Feature)

If you still want to use xRDP package because it provide features that you need (i.e. multi-session),  you can decide to do the following 

  • keep running Ubuntu 24.04 since it will be supported till 2029 
  • plan your upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 (which will be available in April 2026) but choose a different Desktop environment (that still use X11 packages)
  • Plan you upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 (which will be available in April 2026) shipping with the Gnome Desktop but install an additional Desktop interface that will be used only for remote sessions.   This was the approach in the past when Unity desktop was not supported with xRDP and everybody was falling back to xfce desktop
  • start hunting for any other solution that could potentially provide RDP support   

Final Notes

This is it for this post !   

xRDP Team has released new releases which does not yet include Wayland Support.  We have seen that some discussions and code changes are ongoing but we can tell that we are really at an early stage.   We have no information about a possible release date of an xRDP package that would provide support for Wayland.   We will follow up on the possible progress 

The best option, if you really need to use Gnome Desktop with recent distro (i.e. Gnome 49), would be to use the Built-in Gnome remote desktop.  The built-in tool has definitely some limitations but for remote administration, it is more than capable tool. 

We are still investigating if we would release a new version of our little xrdp-installer script since the xrdp package will not work against newer Ubuntu releases.  We are also expecting that other distro or desktop will drop the x11 packages in favor of the Wayland Display Server. At time of writing, there is no xrdp release that can be used against Wayland Display Server   

So, we will keep following the progress on xrdp project and support for Wayland.  We will probably publish a new post on how to use the Gnome Remote Desktop which will be probably the new way forward for Gnome Desktop.  We will release only maintenance version of the xrdp-installer script since it will be probably less and less useable in the future. 

Stay tuned

Till Next time 

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