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Comment by guhcampos | Hacker News Reader

It's a very, very thin web layer on top of native code:

https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/features.html

To the author's defense: Cockpit is Linux only, and they seem to intend on making this also available on Windows and Mac.

Still, I don't see the appeal they seem to do, especially since it relies so much on SSH. The biggest use case I can think for something like this in the real world is something like first-time setup or MDM, and on both situations setting up SSH to begin with has the same level of friction they're trying to remove.

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Windows has quite a lot of remote admin tools that work pretty transparently over the network though.

The issue is that they're historically never turned on or heavily restricted.

Where the user is involved though RDP is a world class remote desktop never exceeded by Linux anywhere.

If someone wants to impress me, point Claude at Wayland and get it so I can seamlessly open remote RDP from somewhere else, lock the local user session and resume it on the remote desktop, then walk back to the original terminal and continue working in that same user session. This worked perfectly over 20 years ago.

Yeah, RDP is great. Sunshine has basically solved this problem for me on Linux, even with {way,hypr}land (haven't tried on macos yet)

Had a look and the "locked local session" problem is still not solved. The gui would be unlocked and visible on the host the whole time.

Do you mean the local session would be locked while you work unlocked from remote? That should be doable with a separate session using a dummy HDMI plug, but your original comment read to me as being able to remote in and lock the session, which is 100% possible with Sunshine

Yes: the RDP experience is even if I just walk away, when I log in from somewhere else the local session is locked and inputs disabled.

Then if I walk back to that console and log in, I can go back to using it directly.

Near as I can tell no one's solved this for Sunshine.

Edit: I will say though there must be good reasons, it's never been clear to me why this is so hard particularly when you have Wayland just compositing to one big buffer in VRAM. Surely we just want to hand the local buffer back to GDM and let the remote stream have whatever we rendered?

It's not insanely hard, I've done it before with a dummy plug and it's possible with the current implementations (essentially what you said: just a separate Wayland session). The reason it is not better supported, I would hazard, is because not many people really need their session locked when they're away - they just need to remote in.

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