At the risk writing an unpopular opinion, circumventing your company IT and security policies is probably not a great idea .

If you can’t tolerate using what’s provided, use feedback mechanisms and try to improve UX, otherwise change jobs. You’re putting yourself and your company at risk by hacking around the “approved” remote access solution.

you’re gonna need to just use a KVM. If the company has policies on RDP and VNC, and you’re attempting to breach those, you’re opening a door for issues under the tech policies you likely signed or agreed to when you started.

I’ll be the first to tell you, as someone in cybersec, that while we aren’t exactly always proactively looking to bust up employees about conduct, when its clear someone repeatedly attempts bypass, we eventually send it off to managers for review. Some of them wind up in worse situations, with confidential management-lead investigations into them, email interception, desktop monitoring, etc… It’s a lot of bullshit for a workaround…

In regards to the VPN of its pushing all traffic over the VPN you can add your own routes to keep some traffic local.

I would take ColorodoPhotog’s advice. On the other hand, my workplace allows us to use the corporate image on VMs, so I just created a VM on Proxmox and I use the VNC feature to access it. The VNC server is not hosted on the VM itself, so nobody can know it is happening. It is a little slower than I would like, though.