I am aware, that X11 is obsolete and will fade out eventually. However I still have a specific use case for it:
I use RustDesk to access my Linux box at home when needed. First it will be started using wake-on-lan and then I can access it using RustDesk which is installed as service and uses my own relay server.
RustDesk also works fine with Wayland - but only in the Desktop session after logging in. For SDDM RustDesk only supports X11.
Kubuntu 25.10 still used X11 for SDDM and I could use RustDesk to login remotely as well and then access the desktop in Wayland without any issues. However with Kubuntu 26.04 X11 is no longer installed by default and SDDM now also uses Wayland. And this is not supported by RustDesk yet (it may be in the future, but so far I have to live with it).
So my plan was to install X11 as well and configure SDDM to use X11 instead of Wayland. But I am not sure, if this would work and where to start.
My current workaround is using auto-login in SDDM. Since the system is in a private environment that’s not too bad - but I’d prefer being able to access the login screen remotely as well.
Are there any other known remote access solutions or is it possible to trigger a login in SDDM via SSH?
I raised a similar question on the GNOME side, and the discussion there also seemed to point to the same underlying issue: this is not really about whether one specific desktop environment or display manager supports this feature today.
The core problem seems to be that there is no commonly agreed Wayland protocol or standardized interface for third-party remote desktop software to access and control the pre-login / login-screen environment in a generic, compositor-independent way.
Because of that, each desktop environment or display manager naturally has to build its own solution. GNOME has its GDM/gnome-remote-desktop/RDP path. KDE seems to be moving toward its own Plasma/KRdp/Plasma Login Manager direction. But third-party software such as RustDesk, AnyDesk, or similar tools still has no common Wayland-native target for unattended access before a user session has started.
I think this is unfortunate for the Linux desktop ecosystem as a whole. Linux has traditionally been valued for giving users choice and flexibility, but in this particular area the practical options seem to be narrowing. As distributions phase out X11 components, the old fallback path for unattended remote access is disappearing, while the generic Wayland-native replacement that third-party software would need does not appear to exist yet.
The end result is that users who need unattended remote access are increasingly pushed toward RDP-based or desktop-specific stacks, even if they would prefer to use other remote desktop software. That feels like a loss of flexibility for the Linux ecosystem, not because any single project is doing something wrong, but because the shared protocol layer needed by third-party tools has not materialized.
So my question is: is there any ongoing discussion, roadmap, or interest in defining such a common Wayland-native interface for pre-login / login-screen remote access, or is the expectation that every desktop environment and display manager will continue to solve this independently?
There is a way to use RDP in SDDM with Wayland? That would be ok for me as well. Or did I misunderstand this?
At least possible, but not smooth, the smooth here doesn’t mean streaming, I mean the procedures.
Mission impossible: Choose remote desktop software I want on Linux.
I don’t care which software it is - it just has to work. But at the moment I have no solution at all to access SDDM running in Wayland via a remote connection. I would happily use VNC, RDP or whatever is required, if it just works.
VNC and RDP are not for general purposes, because it needs direct IP connection for the destination computers, and it is impossible for the computers that behind a firewall.
Only able to use only VNC or RDP are unacceptable.
No issue for me. I have VPN and my own server for that.
Not the case for most people
Yes, but I did not ask for a solution for most people but just for using VNC or RDP in SDDM. Is this possible?
Also Rustdesk is also not a good solution for Wayland at the moment since it has a number of bugs when it comes to different display scaling between client and remote system and keyboard input when the client uses a different layout than the remote sytem - because Rustdesk does not send character input but translated keycodes.