Xrdp showing three borderless terminals when logged in

General system Applications
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XFCE desktop. I installed the xrdp AUR. I added it to the system service (now) and then logged out from local session. I tried to connect to it from Windows using Remote Desktop. After the login screen, all I see is three white borderless terminals on black background. There is nothing more in the screen. If I type something like “thunar” in the terminal, a window of Thunar shows up but that window also borderless. What is the problem?

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There technically isn’t a problem - it is loading the default X session (which includes some xterm).

If you’re expecting something else then you’ll need to configure your .xinitrc file appropriately - it’s all detailed on the Arch wiki page for xrdp.

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it’s all detailed

Probably what you mean is below, but it doesn’t look like “details” to just tell me to start your desktop environment.

After successfully starting a display server, xrdp will execute /etc/xrdp/startwm.sh by default. This script is meant to start a window manager (similar to .xinitrc) and will read from ~/.xinitrc or /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc if they exist. It is recommended to edit ~/.xinitrc to start your desktop environment or window manager, but you can also edit /etc/xrdp/startwm.sh.

I created “xinitrc” and added startxfce4, but now selecting “Xorg” gives me blue blank screen and selecting “Xvnc” gives me this error and closes.

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Anyway what does the "This only supports Xvnc as the backend. " of the following mean? Does it mean both xrdp and xrdp-git only supports Xvnc, so I have to choose “Xvnc” in the drop down below? or does the sentence apply only to “xrdp-git”?

Install the xrdpAUR package (or alternatively xrdp-gitAUR for the development version). This only supports Xvnc as the backend.

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Enabling RDP on Ubuntu/Fedora was fairly easy. I could find a lot of step-by-step tutorial pages on the Internet and after installing xrdp, the only thing I had to manually do was adding the user group. For Arch, the only page I could find was that Arch manual, and that page seems to be written by some expert Arch user who thinks all other users who would be reading the page are also experts.

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Arch Linux is targeted towards intermediate/expert Linux users. They don’t cater to beginners and are unapologetic about it. There are other distributions for beginners.

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I found a page by searching the web this time with “rdp manjaro” instead of “Arch” or “EndeavourOS”. The page was concise and step-by-step. I followed that page, and I successfully enabled RDP. The only minor changes I did were

  • sudo echo... did not work with permission error. I just created /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config and added allowed_users=anybody.
  • edit command did not exist. I used nano instead.
  • Instead of --sh-syntax startplasma-x11, I used “startxfce4”.

I am not complaining about difficult explanation for difficult things. Why such complex page when the same thing can be explained easy and concise as that page?