smk-labs

Remote Claude Desk — Design skill for Claude Code

Design community

Claude Desktop on an always-on Linux box, reached from a Mac.

How to install Remote Claude Desk

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open smk-labs/remote-claude-desk and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What Remote Claude Desk does

Claude Desktop on an always-on Linux box, reached from a Mac. Agent sessions survive a closed lid, a dropped network and a change of location. Fixes the Command key, a second keyboard layout, the Unicode clipboard and xrdp's real-world failure modes.

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README

remote-claude-desk

Claude Desktop lives on an always-on Linux box. Your Mac is just the screen.

Close the lid, lose the wifi, walk to a cafe, reboot the laptop. The agent session does not notice, because it was never running on the laptop. You reconnect and the window is exactly where you left it, mid-task.

That is the whole idea. Everything in this repo exists because getting there is harder than it sounds: a Linux desktop viewed from a Mac is close to unusable out of the box, and the reasons are all small, silent, and separately annoying.

Why not just run it locally

A local Claude Desktop is tied to the machine you carry. That is fine until a long agent run meets a closed lid. A remote one is tied to a box that never sleeps, so the run is decoupled from your day.

long tasks keep going while the laptop is shut, asleep, or on a plane
the machine that does the work has a stable IP and stays on one network
your laptop's battery, fans and memory are not part of the job
one cheap VM can hold several sessions, and you reach them from anywhere

What it is not

Not a way to share one Claude subscription between people, and not a hosting product. It connects your Mac to your own Linux box over your own SSH.

It also does not install Claude Desktop for you, and it works perfectly well with no Claude anywhere: what it really ships is a Linux desktop from a Mac that behaves the way a Mac user expects.

It is not an RDP client either, and no longer tries to be. You connect with Microsoft's Windows App, which keeps its own saved credentials and its own keyboard handling. Its clipboard is the one part you switch off: it deadlocks the app, so the clipboard travels over SSH instead. This repo used to drive FreeRDP's SDL client; that client froze, macOS recorded where, and the whole client layer was deleted on 2026-09-05. The measurements are in [docs/lessons.md](docs/lessons.md), trap 11.