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Transition to Wayland opened so many user experience regressions. Many are solved today, or at least partially solved but...

There is still no possibility to have proper remote sessions when using Wayland. On any Window Manager and any distro. It's such a shitshow when you go into details. Nothing works, including third party tools (like NoMachine) and I could find no real hope for actual solutions being designed.

The best you can go with "remote session" on Wayland is viewing a desktop session that was already opened by someone directly on the computer. You can partially work around this by... setting your account to be automatically logged in with no password :D And even then it's a crippled experience.

A basic feature I used for the past 25 years and helped me to learn linux and offer safe space for others to learn it as well. To work around work computer limitations. To use your best hardware wherever and whenever you want.

I currently had to ditch both my favorite distro and WM because of that. But at least we can make screenshots nowadays, so I guess it could be worse.



The "Transition to Wayland" from a user experience pov is the slowest car crash of all time. We are like 1.5 DECADES in at this point.

I have a simple application written in QT6. It works on Windows, macOS, and X11/Linux. On Wayland/Linux, applications cannot move their own windows anymore, because "security". Good luck finding this in the QT documentation, it is there, but only at 3/dozens of places were it would be necessary, and 2/3 of those dont mention the word "Wayland". Great fun.


There are slower ones, like IPv4 to IPv6 transition. Jokes aside, in Linux any transition happens instant or never.


Kde's new Plasma Login Manager / Plasma Login (backend/frontend) have been coming along nicely (replacing sddm), and include remote login support. Just announced this past spring but very active. https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/a-roadmap-for-a-moder...


That's exactly what I was talking about before. Tried on newest fedora but that simply isn't it. It's remote support to an existing session. Names are misleading.


In Gnome, the option is in Settings -> System -> Remote Desktop.

You can enable the rdp server there. It does allow opening new sessions remotely. It works fine.


> There is still no possibility to have proper remote sessions when using Wayland. On any Window Manager and any distro. It's such a shitshow when you go into details. Nothing works, including third party tools (like NoMachine) and I could find no real hope for actual solutions being designed.

Gnome has had remote desktop sharing I think since 46.

Settings --> System --> Remote Desktop

The "desktop sharing" tab is for setting credentials to share your logged in screen.

The "Remote Login" tab is for setting credentials to access GDM and login as any user (i.e. headless).


"gnome-remote-desktop" does exactly that - providing (amongst other capabilities) a way to handle remote logins: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop


Remote assistance, NOT remote logins. It can be used as support when someone is already went to that computer, authenticated and has a full gnome session opened.

So you literally CANNOT log in remotely :) If you are lucky, you can assist remotely to a session someone opened locally on that machine.

And it's like that on any other WM. KDE also has a deceiving option in settings that suggests full remote desktop, while it doesn't allow that.


Please just click in the link, read the README! It offers: - remote assistance - headless multi user remote login - headless (single user)


I don't want to argue on semantics. Currently you can't start a graphical session completely remotely using any protocol (RDP, VNC, no machine, whatever).


I don't use GNOME, or GDM, or RDP, but isn't https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop#headless... describing that?

> GNOME Remote Desktop supports integrating with the GNOME Display Manager (GDM) to achieve remote login functionality. This feature is only available via the RDP protocol. It works by the remote user first authenticating via a system wide password, which gives access to the graphical login screen, where they can login using their user specific credentials.

And then it seems to describe a pure-cli config process that you could set up once over SSH and then be able to RDP to the box thereafter.

Actually for that matter, the next section - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop#headless... - appears to describe doing a single-user version of the same, explicitly running headless.


Have you actually tried setting it up on Wayland yourself?

Please do.

I've seen too many threads like this based on a hunch and docs, while it just doesn't work.

I'll be more than happy to be proven wrong.


I've used it. It works fine. You connect with RDP, get a gdm login screen, and can log in.


Thank you, I will definitely test it soon.


> Have you actually tried setting it up on Wayland yourself?

I use it very regularly. Particularly the headless part (where nobody is logged in physically, just a remote session).


It's not explicit from the link, but does it allow the headless login to be resumed from console and vice versa?

I tried some solutions in the past but they did not support that, which is a deal breaker.


There are no headless sessions on Wayland. At all.

You want proper headless session, set up X11 distro and use xrdp - it's really easy. But on wayland "remote support" to something that is already displayed on screen is all you can get now.


What I want is to be able to start a session remotely after a reboot, and continue that same session when I get back home. And conversely start a session while at my desk at home and resume that same session remotely. Without any weird limitations.

In other words, how RDP works on Windows.

So you're saying that is still not possible I take it.




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