Headless Remote Desktops on KDE with Wayland (don't really work)
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 9 фев 2025
- How to set up Sunshine/Moonlight: • Sunshine and Moonlight...
A review of the current options for remotely accessing a Linux install running KDE and Wayland in early 2025. I try KRDP, RustDesk, Nomachine, XRDP with TigerVNC, and Sunshine with Moonlight. I also discuss Anydesk.
The short answer is: nothing works perfectly. You would need to switch to X11 or use Gnome to get full functionality at the moment. Bummer. Out of the options I tried, Sunshine/Moonlight seemed to offer the best experience, but was the most work to setup and configure.
=== Timestamps ===
00:00 Introduction
00:17 The absolute state of Wayland Remote Desktop in 2025
02:10 Testing KRDP (built in to KDE)
03:35 Why nothing will really work
05:14 Testing Nomachine
06:22 Testing RustDesk
07:35 What about XRDP/TigerVNC?
08:23 Testing Sunshine/Moonlight
10:40 Conclusion
Thank you for this. I was going to replace my Debian Cinnamon desktop with OpenMandriva, but since the Proxmox VM doesn't have a dedicated monitor, i figured I would check first. Looks like Cinnamon will remain.
BTW, I tried Ubuntu's Gnome and its remote option required weird login scripts to work and then a bunch of applications would not open over RDP. They ran fine on the terminal display, but refused to load over RDP.
I hope X survives long enough for Wayland to be functional for non gaming desktop/servers. I have yet to get a Wayland session to function as needed
The moment this tech stack stops being an asinine hack every desktop PC in the world will become a server
00:55 or C you can download a sunshine-server appimage set a few permissions and stream your desktop real tme, which is gud enough for gaming. it may not be bandwith efficient. but the app itself ses 200-400mb ram and about 6-10% cpu on a 10 year old I3, doing fluent 1080p@60fps for everything else SSH
Learned something new today. A fresh hell to not walk into.
I found your video as I'm trying to make Remmina and RDP work, as an alternative to Rustdesk, so far with no success.
I've been on KDE Plasma Wayland with Rustdesk built from Archlinux AUR packages on my laptop for a few months now, that I often remote control with a PC running pop_OS or Windows from the living room. It shows the login screen from SDDM and I can login, keeping in mind it turns back to EN keyboard layout. Then the connexion need to be retried to access the desktop after the splash screen. Seems it's the same with GDM running Gnome Wayland on my other box.
If you've not made any progress yet, maybe check back your Rustdesk settings, try to enable its "headless linux header" option in the preference and maybe keep the codec to x264, as I feel it's the most stable for now in my case. Rustdesk dont like to close and reopen on the same session also, and I had several time where some process couldnt be closed during shutdown. Also, I only use Rustdesk on my local network with a loacl IP whitelist...
Do you have the configuration set to use X11 on SDDM for remote access? RustDesk's docss have that as the prescribed solution still.
@@TechDregs You're right, display server is still set to X11 in /usr/lib/sddm/sddm.conf.d/default.conf. I didnt edited that tho, and have no additionnal conf file. But after the splash screen and trying to reconnect with rustdesk it is wayland.
I also have XWayland installed and its showing a few percent of activity in top. Not sure if it's caused by rustdesk tho.
x11 + nomachine + kde + remote login works for me well enough
Have you tried KDE's built in remote desktop? I think it should just work without even installing Nomachine if you are using X11.
@TechDregs krdp is wayland only (i think). on x11, i have only gotten error messages when i tried it.
nomachine was the only headless solution that worked for me without buying a dummy hdmi plug or requiring heavy configuration. supposedly chrome remote desktop also should "just work", it didn't for me, though.
Surprised to see you comment about lag on sunshine. I have much less lag with it than any other RDP solution I've used.
I definitely wouldn't say it's bad. Very minor, and very usable. As I mention, I edited this whole video, remotely, using it.
SO, just figured out a lot of the input lag I saw was simply that I had the feed at 30fps instead of 60. I even saw the setting the first time, but it didn't click in my head until later that it was part of why I was seeing such input latency.
I attempted last week to go on that road, KDE Plasma + RDP/VNC
I even tried sunshine/moonlight (which was a catastrophy)
I spent two entire evening to get something to works
Needless to say, I'm back to x11 + i3wm
Oh and I forgot to mention, even with moonlight/sunshine I had scaling issues with my taskbar
This was my first time ever using wayland, well, not a great experience
Remotely connecting to an headless server is such a big need in the corporate world, wayland is missing big time on that feature, such a shame
I agree. As I mentioned to someone else, I think RHEL has Gnome standard, and Gnome has a headless remote desktop solution worked out. I can't imagine corporate clients would stand for it otherwise. Fortunately, Sunshine/Moonlight has been working pretty well for me. But having to enable autologon to make it work is still stupid.
So Wayland/remote login works with Gnome , but not KDE?
As best I can tell. I can't verify it since I don't run Gnome. I think it's helped by the fact that RHEL runs Gnome, and there's no way that enterprise customers wouldn't demand that to work.
It has issues. My last attempt on Ubuntu Gnome, a bunch of applications wouldn't load on the rdp session. They worked on the terminal, but wouldn't load over rdp. Remote desktop on Wayland is a hack job because Wayland explicitly doesn't support remote desktop on purpose
@@cap_eath whoa, on purpose? What's the idea then , in terms of how you are supposed to use a remote desktop?