I ran into the same issue …. I can ssh into the RPi from my MacBook Pro, but cannot RDP into it. Long story short I learnedthat RDP requires a different username than the one you’re using on the RPI. If your RPi’s root user is ‘pi’ then for some reason (probably security) you cannot also rdp in as ‘pi’; you need to create another username using the adduser command on the RPi.

This isn’t my solution, I merely found it on the RaspberryPi forum, tried it, and it worked!

I’ve excerpted the solution text below, and the link below that. Some additional hints at the bottom…..Hope this help!

Re: Remote desktop connection not working, no desktop after login
Tue Oct 25, 2022 7:47 am
XRDP doesn’t work for root user ‘pi’, You need to create another user. The Pi root user cannot RDP for whatever reason.

sudo adduser <username>.
Choose password
Confirm password
Hit enter for defaults
Try RDP again with that login

I hope this helps the next person running into this!

forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=339980

PS: You may find that you won’t have access to all the directories and files that the root account had. For example, opening the terminal, will show you a different user’s command prompt than what you normally see.

After RDP-ing into the RaspberryPI, open a terminal;

Suppose the rdp user account name is ‘new-rdp-user’; you should see the following prompt

and the pwd ( print working directory ) command will show the new user’s home directory

new-rdp-user@raspberrypi:~ $ pwd
/home/new-rdp-user

To change back over to the root user, ‘pi’ (if that was the original root user),

use the ‘su ‘ command to use that user’s login

new-rdp-user@raspberrypi:~ $ su pi
Password:
pi@raspberrypi:/home/new-rdp-user $

But here, you can see the directory did not change … it’s still in the new user’s home # directory so just type ‘cd’ followed by [Enter] to go to pi’s home directory

pi@raspberrypi:/home/new-rdp-user $ pwd
/home/new-rdp-user
pi@raspberrypi:/home/new-rdp-user $ cd
pi@raspberrypi:~ $
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ pwd
/home/pi

Now you should see all of the pi’s directories and files

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ pwd
/home/pi

To get out of pi’s login context, just type the ‘exit’ command

and you’ll be back to new-rdp-user’s user prompt – hope this helps 🙂

Can’t get this working. I have a rpizero with 32 bit os with desktop. SSH works but remote desktop gives error. Trying from a mac mini with monterey.:

connecting to sesame on 127.0.0.1.3350
sesame connect ok
sending login info to session manager.Please wait…
login successful for user xxx on display 10
started connecting
connection problem, giving up
some problem

Error connecting to user session

Any suggestions ?
Thanks