xrdp – New release available (0.10.4.x)

Griffon

Hello World, 

Since we are dealing with xrdp package and Ubuntu 25.10 release,  we wante to keep you updated on the xrdp releases.  In July 2025, a new release of the xrdp package has been published.  In fact, 2 releases have been published.  xrdp package 0.10.4 and the  package version 0.10.4.1 which is basically fixing some bugs discovered in the release 0.10.4. 

The team behind xrdp package tries to update on a regular base new version of their xrdp package.  The release cadence for xrdp package is usually every 3 months.  So, we are expecting a new release around end of the year.  

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 

New features – Version 0.10.4.1 

The latest and greatest version of xRDP is set to 0.10.4.1 .  This package has been released a few months ago (July, 2025). This release includes some new features and some bug fixing.  This release provides minor new features and some bug fixing… No security issues have been detected 

Let’s have a quick look on what this release brings up …. The following points are coming from github release announcement page 

  • When running as a Hyper-V VM, additional security features can be provided by setting the vmconnect parameter in xrdp.ini. Thanks to @gpotter2 for this great feature (#3524)
  • Add Latvian keyboards (#3511, #3519)

 

Security fixes & Bug Fixes

No security fixes are included in this release  but a number of small bug fixes have been shipped with this release.  We have listed them hereafter (from github release announcement page) 

    • systemd detection has been improved on Debian-based systems (#3497, #3502)
    • xrdp sessions fail with Quest/OneIdentity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (#3498, #3507)
    • A race condition at chansrv startup which can result in chansrv not being killed has been addressed (#3482)
    • Various Coverity warnings have been addressed (#3508)
    • A possible double-free on chansrv exit has been addressed (#3546)
    • Version 0.10.4.1 also fixed an issue that would prevent the software to work properly 

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.  Any distribution using the latest Gnome 49 desktop interface will not work with xRDP package.  More specifically, the package can still be installed on your distro running Gnome 49.  You might need to download some additional x11 packages to ensure successful compilation.  However, when you will try to connect,  the xRDP session will not be established and you will be disconnected almost immediately.  This is expected behavior since xRDP package relies on X11 packages and not on Wayland Display Server  

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 ?

If you are using any distro where Gnome 49 is shipping by default,  you will not be able to use the XRDP software package “out of the box”.  So, if you are using Ubuntu 25.10 with Gnome Desktop, xRDP will not be working at all.  

Does it means that there is no way for me to perform remote desktop against Ubuntu 25.10 and Gnome  ?   

No, not exactly.  There are some options that are available but as you can expected there will be some limitations and restrictions.  

The first option would be to use the built in remote desktop solution available within Gnome 49 (Testing Gnome 46 Remote Login Feature).  Using this feature, 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  

The built-in solution does not provide 

  • multi-user support 
  • Clipboard support  
  • Drive Redirection support 

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 a few month again a new release 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 Ubuntu 25.10 and later releases.  We are also expecting that other distro or desktop will drop the x11 packages in favor of the Wayland Display Server.   

So, we will be busy in the coming days/weeks and we will try either to release the new version of the script in the near future or provide some guidance on how to use the existing script against newer Ubuntu releases (i.e. 25.10 or later)

Stay tuned

Till Next time 

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