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Comment by daemoens | Hacker News Reader

You could get a dummy HDMI plug for $3 on Amazon and free up that monitor if you need it. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/BKFK-HDMI-Dummy-Plug-3840x2160/dp/B0C...

I do use it occasionally - mostly when Windows has thrown up some issue stopping Steam from working properly.

eg. I need to dismiss a dialog that is invisible over remote play, or it won't finish logging in until I close a "finish setting up your windows install" screen.

Go to the gaming machine and upgrade it to > home or edu version if needed. Enable remote desktop with auth on your network for that machine. As long as Windows is booted and able to be logged in to on the gaming machine you can go on your other machine:

Win+R mstsc.exe and put in the gaming machine's name or IP and follow the instructions, checking all "remember this" boxes (there's 2, three if you count the certificate).

RDP won't let you play games but it is functionally identical to sitting at the machine itself.

I meant to come back and fix this but missed the window. I am unsure if the home/edu/N/P whatever versions of windows 7, 8, 10, and 11 support actually remote controlling the desktop as opposed to merely getting a "video feed" as it were. There's ways to upgrade to pro that are beyond my pay grade to discuss, but i think you can get a clean copy of windows that supports RDP for $130. If your alternative is "having a monitor plugged in 24/7" or "dummy cables but still have to plug a monitor in if something goes wrong with steam link {and it will. -ed.}" or other hacks/hardware, and you're already running windows at least the GPU/gaming side, RDP practically pays for itself even though it's $130 for that feature.

Someone else probably has alternatives (moonlight? bazzite? gopro and a soviet-era robotic arm (it only leaks a bit when it's hot outside.))

consider a different remote access option i.e. sunshine + moonlight instead of using steam remote play

Can confirm, Sunshine + Moonlight are a killer combination.

I run a Windows VM on one of my servers for some gaming because I don't run Window's otherwise, and with Sunshine on the VM, I can play with moonlight from my TV, laptop, desktop, phone, ROG Ally (Bazzite), tablet, basically anything that can support Moonlight.

I still don't understand why operating systems can't properly work without a screen.

I have a Linux "home server" and I haven't found a way to boot up a graphical session with everything working (there were bugs in some applications, like menus not showing up, you couldn't change resolution, etc.).

A dummy HDMI plug fixed it, but still. It's 2025, come on.

You can definitely run graphical environments without a screen in a virtual environment, e.g. https://github.com/selkies-project/docker-nvidia-egl-desktop which is even GPU accelerated

Parsec has a driver which adds virtual monitors so you should be able to use that instead of a dummy HDMI plug.

Another issue is not having a mouse plugged in will mean you have no mouse cursor when remoting in.

> not having a mouse plugged in will mean you have no mouse cursor when remoting in.

Parsec has a setting to fix that too. Look in the host options.

macOS has no issues with no monitor fwiw

Headless X11 machines were a thing then it was all abandoned.

Wayland. Solving the problems of yesterday, tomorrow.

You can run Windows server headless too, and run individual applications over the RDP protocol, exactly like using an X server on a machine with a screen to run Xeyes on a headless machine.

Anyone have a good tutorial or reference for doing that on a modern windows system? It would be very useful alternative to VM seamless style and allow Linux X11 system as the hypervisor with windows VM.

Well, i buried the lede. you need windows server to do it easily; once you have windows server set up, you need terminal services to be enabled and installed for that server. Then you can set up "single application mode" application. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...

I didn't really need a guide, it's pretty straightforward; we ran firefox on a windows server VM in AWS and watched youtube videos, in 2009, just to prove it could be done. We offered thin client conversions to companies. never had any clients, too early, i guess, and everything went to cellphones instead. When i say we watched youtube videos, i mean on our test computer in front of us there was a firefox icon on the windows desktop local, and double clicking it, after a few seconds, would launch a firefox window, but instead of the firefox icon it would be the mstsc.exe icon, and you were not looking at an executable's output on your screen, you were looking at the output of the executable in the cloud.

anyhow the windows server software takes care of bundling/packaging/deploying of the the little "scripts" that let you have a desktop icon and everything else. I think there's a wizard.

edit: i buried another lede. The video quality of youtube over terminal services in 2009 with our crappy dsl was... "talking head" - or as i like to call it "peak apple quicktime video circa 1996" - approx. 15fps

Thank you for these details.

When I looked into doing it once on a modern system and stopped when window server entered the story. I’ve been hoping there might be a simple solution but that had me stumble upon Parallels RAS which I’ve been considering doing an evaluation of.

https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se...

My primary battlestation system (not gaming but for business) is 8X4k monitors on a custom Linux system driven by 2 high end GPUs. What I’d ideally like to have is many Win11 pro application windows managed by my X11 windows manager.

looks like microsoft has jumped into this area since i last looked (eesh, 16 years ago is what i was basing my info on!): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/... https://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/technet/download...

so it looks like, in addition to the method i mentioned, you can also virtualize the applications within "App-V" which is like hyper-v for apps (is anyone catching all of this? is this thing on?).

Microsoft made a firecracker or whatever for windows apps and no one told me?

edit: i'm shocked there's not a kitsch-y name for this like "Windowless Office Suite" for on-prem office that's virtualized for app-v... Someone at microsoft should pay me if they use this.

Quick skim seems to suggest the client to that system is Windows only.

I’m hoping for a Linux client which apparently the commercial Parallels RAS provides.

I think MacOS is even more hopeless than Windows for a per window or seamless remote GUI application solution. For Linux I use Xpra which honestly with GPU server and client acceleration can feel like magic. The dream for me would be a Linux based system for display using an X11 window manager to manage remote GUI application windows from all 3 platforms from multiple systems, all GPU accelerated on both ends.

Apple seems to have a particular hatred for the idea of anyone using their OS remotely for whatever reason, though Parsec works quite well for me, though I’ve heard there is a sunshine+moonlight approach that does even better than Parsec …

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-using-seamless-rd...

rdesktop has a "-A" flag for seamless mode which looks like it does what you want. I'm telling you we had that working 16 years ago via AWS - the AWS side was running windows but there wasn't any reason we had to be [running windows] on the client side. I merely mentioned that microsoft apparently didn't rest on their laurels with msts, they now support even more thin client mechanisms.

Back in days (around twenty years ago) I used NoMachine on Debian/SPARC to do exactly this: run GNOME remotely.

Waypipe nowadays allows the same, but I don't think it has resuming support.

There is also this: https://github.com/VirtualDisplay/Virtual-Display-Driver

Never used it, but I heard great things!

Ran into problems, but that's probably because of the proxmox pcie passthrough nvidia gpu torture chamber I went through, and not the driver.

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