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Comment by kallistisoft | Hacker News Reader

At this point the primary thing that's keeping me from switching to Wayland (KDE) is lack of support for remote desktop software, especially with multiple monitors...

Hopefully AnyDesk and Remmina will address this issue before KDE ends it's mainline X11 support next year.

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I've had a similar issue recently and I found that rustdesk[0] works pretty well for casual use despite wayland support being labelled experimental. I use it for pair programming with someone on multiple monitors while I'm on a laptop and all the switching and zooming required worked.

[0] https://rustdesk.com/

:) This is a feature of a wayland compositor: I don't want it able to do remote.

It doesn’t have to be like X11. Presumably, it’d be something you could disable if you’d like.

It’d be very handy if we had a performant remote desktop option for Linux. I could resume desktop sessions on my workstation from my laptop and I could pair program with remote colleagues more effectively.

In the past I’d boot into Windows and then boot my Linux system as a raw disk VM just so I could use Windows’s Remote Desktop. Combined with VMware Workstation’s support for multiple monitors, I had a surprisingly smooth remote session. But, it was a lot of ceremony.

OTOH, the enthusiasm for breaking legitimate features that people were using has not helped Wayland adoption.

It is optional: if you want it you will need to select a compositor which does have this expensive feature.

Don't forget, wayland is fully dynamic.

That's one of Wayland's other major faults IMO

It is a major improvement: many real life compositor implementations, discover dynamically the features of the compositor, some will have a remote desktop expensive feature.

I really struggle to believe that remote desktop is expensive to implement/run. And no, this isn't an improvement: It used to be that everyone used Xorg, so all desktops had largely the same features. There was, for example, a way to set keyboard layout that always worked (setxkbmap), and it always worked. Now there are endless different compositors, and they all have different features. Do you want to try a new option? Good luck finding out if it actually does everything you need! Do you need a particular feature? Well, I sure hope you like one of the specific desktops that supports it, because it's a toss-up which support what.

Actually it is a massive improvement: expensive niche features are now optional, features you have to discover and handle dynamically. This helps to avoid developer/vendor lock-in by 'tons of features required'.

If I am not too mistaken there are several "remote desktop network protocols", maybe the dev teams behind them could agree on a common network protocol.

And the more compositor implementations, the merrier, a bit like the x11 window managers.

I am coding mine for linux and AMD GPUs, as a hobby, in RISC-V assembly running on x86_64 via an interpreter (thanks to wayland being an IPC interface)... well until very recently, it has been more some kind of research and development of a "method" to code modular assembly projects with a minimal SDK, in other words to decide on various technical compromises requiring coding _real life_ software in order to hit the right sweet spot.

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