About

TextureMind Desktop (TMD) is a software to allow remote access to a personal computer’s desktop (the host machine) from a client device. It is composed by a server running on the host machine and a client application which connects to the server. The application exposes a simple user interface to make the user access and interact with the desktop of the host machine.

Why TextureMind Desktop?

TMD is an easy-to-install Remote Desktop Software for Windows and Linux with High Performance and GPU encoding (where available). It can deliver up to 4K resolutions at 60 fps (and more) on modern hardware. TMD can run on physical machines (your PC) or virtual machines (VMware, EC2, Google Cloud). It’s totally FREE for personal use and paid for commercial use.

Go to Download Page to get and install the software.

What are the best features of TMD?

  • Simplicity. With the smallest number of dependencies, TMD is super consistent, self contained and easy to port to any operating system.
    • Applications are coded on top of a single module with the remote desktop protocol.
    • 1 language, 1 framework, 1 repository for both viewer and server.
    • Everything is designed for being developed and maintained by a single person.
  • Linux Everywhere. TMD can build in 1 minute on CentOS 7 and run on Ubuntu24, OpenSUSE 15, Amazon Linux 2023.7 or any Linux distro from glibc 2.17 onwards.
  • Robustness. It never crashes or leaks memory, even in 1 month of consecutive video streaming.
  • Design. TMD is based on objects with interfaces on a custom variant of component object modules. Functionalities can be accessed only through abstraction layers, so it can be virtually ported anywhere.
  • Dealing with high CPU usage. TMD has been designed to work in extreme scenarios, like 100% CPU usage in low powered machines.
  • Network usage. TMD is designed to work with about 20 or 50 Mbps but can handle up to 1 Gbps without performance bottlenecks.
  • Serialization. TextureMind Binary Format (TBF) has been designed to guarantee a compact and fast binary format with strong principles of backward and forward compatibility, like Google Protobuf.
    • Used for client / server transmission of messages and all the native formats in TextureMind Framework for saving images, sounds, gui pages, 2D and 3D models.
    • Optimized for being fast and compact: integer values are stored in base128 and the fields are not tagged for every recurrence inside the data structure: they are deserialized thanks to a special system based on reading keys.
    • You don’t need to keep numeric tags like in protobuf, but just the variable names. Unlike protobuf, you don’t need to build source code for every data structure in your project.
    • Serialize super complicated data structures with lists, trees, expression nodes, images, gui pages, 3d models, materials, with millions of iterations without getting a single crash.

Background

The project was born from TextureMind Framework, which is an entire C++ development environment with the basic features for managing multithreading, inter-process communication, networking, dynamic modules, plugins, compression, serialization, but also 2D and 3D graphics, a proprietary GUI system, an entire 3D engine, a material system based on expression nodes, internal computer vision’s architecture and 2D / 3D audio system compatible with Dolby Surround 7.1 (but potentially atmos). TextureMind Framework doesn’t use external dependencies for basic functionalities but only graphics / audio libraries and some other import / export library, like stb_image, turbo-jpeg, ffmpeg, and assimp. TextureMind Framework is super consistent, self contained and easy to port to any operating system, the same goes for any product derived from the framework, like TMD.

TMD will benefit from the framework consistency and all the additional features not implemented in other remoting protocols, for optimizing performance and easily evolving the project into advanced functionalities. TMD is a look to the future, but without the heaviness of modern projects.

Current Version

  • TMD Viewer 2025.0.3
  • TMD Server 2025.0.3

WIP Version

  • TMD Viewer 2025.1.0
  • TMD Server 2025.1.0

Still missing work in progress features:

  • Custom Virtual Display Driver to mount virtual monitors on GPU-less machines
  • Custom Virtual Audio Driver to enable audio on virtual machine
  • Custom Credentials Provider to skip win-logon screen on Windows
  • Copy any clipboard data from server on Windows
  • Multi-monitors in the same viewer application
  • Web-browser client with HTTPS connections
  • UDP transport
  • MacOS support
  • ARM cpu support
  • Multiple user session on Windows
  • Virtual sessions on Linux
  • Game-pad support
  • File transfer
  • USB redirection
  • Printer redirection
  • Android support
  • iOS support