What I’ve seen of rustdesk so far is that it’s absolutely not even close to the options available for X. It replaces TeamViewer, not thin clients.
You would need the following to get viability in my eyes:
Multiple users per server (~50 users)
Enterprise SSO authentication, working kerberos on desktop
Good and easily deployable native clients for Windows, Linux and Mac, plus html5 client
Performant headless software rendered desktops
GPU acceleration possible but not required
Clustering, HA control plane, load balancing
Configuration management available
This isn’t even an edge case. Current and upcoming regulations on information security drags the entire industry this way. Medical, research, defence, banking, basically every regulated landscape gets easier to work in when going down this route. Close to zero worries about endpoint security. Microsoft is working hard on this. It’s easy to do with X. And the best thing on Wayland is RustDesk? As stated earlier, these issues were brought up and discarded as FUD in 2008, and here we are.
Wayland isn’t a better replacement, after 15 years it’s still not a replacement. The Wayland implementations certainly haven’t been rushed, but the architecture was. At this point, fucking Arcan will be viable before Wayland.
Fair enough, I haven’t worked in an industry with requirements like that. Can you share an example of software you would use for a setup like that? I’m interested in learning more about it. I wonder how many companies are currently using a solution like that with Linux.
Wayland itself isn’t doing anything to prevent those solutions from working, but nobody has chosen to create a solution like that supporting Wayland. If the companies working on and funding Wayland need a solution like that, then they can make or fund it.
Right now, Wayland is good enough to be used on employee workstations for most peoples day to day work, because most people dont work at a company using a solution like you described.
After 15 years, Wayland is lacking some things X11 has, but has also far surpassed it in many ways. Linux is now usable on HiDPI and has proper color management. Companies like Redhat aren’t picking features at random, they’re prioritizing what their biggest customers need, because thats what makes money. Again, just to reiterate, Wayland supports the usecases you’ve described, but companies haven’t made software for this usecases that works with Wayland.
Wayland may not be a better replacement for you, but is sure is for a ton of users and organizations.
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.
What I’ve seen of rustdesk so far is that it’s absolutely not even close to the options available for X. It replaces TeamViewer, not thin clients.
You would need the following to get viability in my eyes:
This isn’t even an edge case. Current and upcoming regulations on information security drags the entire industry this way. Medical, research, defence, banking, basically every regulated landscape gets easier to work in when going down this route. Close to zero worries about endpoint security. Microsoft is working hard on this. It’s easy to do with X. And the best thing on Wayland is RustDesk? As stated earlier, these issues were brought up and discarded as FUD in 2008, and here we are.
Wayland isn’t a better replacement, after 15 years it’s still not a replacement. The Wayland implementations certainly haven’t been rushed, but the architecture was. At this point, fucking Arcan will be viable before Wayland.
Fair enough, I haven’t worked in an industry with requirements like that. Can you share an example of software you would use for a setup like that? I’m interested in learning more about it. I wonder how many companies are currently using a solution like that with Linux.
Wayland itself isn’t doing anything to prevent those solutions from working, but nobody has chosen to create a solution like that supporting Wayland. If the companies working on and funding Wayland need a solution like that, then they can make or fund it.
Right now, Wayland is good enough to be used on employee workstations for most peoples day to day work, because most people dont work at a company using a solution like you described.
After 15 years, Wayland is lacking some things X11 has, but has also far surpassed it in many ways. Linux is now usable on HiDPI and has proper color management. Companies like Redhat aren’t picking features at random, they’re prioritizing what their biggest customers need, because thats what makes money. Again, just to reiterate, Wayland supports the usecases you’ve described, but companies haven’t made software for this usecases that works with Wayland.
Wayland may not be a better replacement for you, but is sure is for a ton of users and organizations.
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.