Does anyone have any suggestions for headless desktop access under wayland, including remote login. For context nomachine has been my goto for this as it has generally just worked out of the box, but currently they seem to be having issues under Plasma specifically with Wayland since the 6.0 release. I’m still hoping that the get it figured out soon as like I said they have been my goto in the past. I have tried the current krdpserver implementation and am very impressed, but it does require that you are logged into your desktop session i.e. lacks remote login, so it really doesn’t work as a full headless solution.
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Wanted to share how I have solved this for now.
For reference I use KDE Plasma with Wayland. Plasma supports remote desktop access via pipewire / desktop portals. The issue is that the user needs to be logged into a graphical session for the rdp server to run, and sddm does not natively, for very good security reasons, support remote login.
My work around was to install sway and waynvc, and switch the sddm compositor from kwin_wayland to sway which is wlroots based. I created a simple sway config file:
/etc/sway/sddm_config
xwayland disable
exec wayvnc;
and edited the sddm config:
/etc/sddm.config.d/10-wayland.conf
[General]
DisplayServer=wayland
GreeterEnvironment=QT_WAYLAND_SHELL_INTEGRATION=layer-shell
[Wayland]
# CompositorCommand=kwin_wayland --drm --no-lockscreen --no-global-shortcuts --locale1
CompositorCommand=sway -c /etc/sway/sddm_config
Now to log into the machine I use vnc, via a ssh loopback, and after logging in I RDP into the user session. It’s not ideal because it’s a two step process but it works.
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