this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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The thing is - wayland does kind of prevent it by forcing the GPU into the rendering pipeline far harder than Xorg. The GPU-assumptions throughout the code base(s) makes latency shoot through the roof when running software rendered. If you want decent latency, you need a GPU, and if you want to run multiuser you are going to pay Nvidia a shitton of money.
I can also imagine it’s hard (impossible?) to do performant damage tracking in a VNC server without implementing at least parts of the VNC server inside the compositor. This means that the compositor and VNC server gets tightly coupled by necessity. Choice will be limited. Would you like the bad DE with the good VNC server or the good DE with the bad VNC server? Bad damage tracking means shit latency and high bandwidth usage, or other tradeoffs. So even if someone managed to implement what I want on Wayland, it would most likely be limited to a single compositor and not a general solution allowing a free choice of compositor.
Best software suite I know of for it is Cendio Thinlinc, on top of TigerVNC. Free for up to 5 users. There are some others in the same niche. My recommendation would be to try Thinlinc on Rocky 9 or Ubuntu 24, and configure it to use XFCE. Mate, KDE, or Cinnamon, all work fine. Turn off compositing! Over a good WAN-link it feels mostly local unless playing fullscreen videos. On a LAN-link, the only thing giving it away is extra tearing and compression artifacts when playing youtube-videos fullscreen. Compared to many others solutions I have tried, the latency and ”immersion” is incredible.
As for me, I’ll try to never manage linux desktop fleets or remote desktops again.