Here is my latest blog post on a method of using a laptop equipped with an X11 server as a KVM or graphical dumb terminal (not to be confused with “kernel virtual machine”) to display an entire desktop environment on one of the virtual terminals of the laptop. You might be familiar with running an X11-compatible program over SSH, seeing a remote GUI app displayed on your local machine. You could also run a whole desktop environment such as “xfce4-session” over SSH and attach it to a virtual terminal (which you switch between using Ctrl-Alt-F1 through Ctrl-Alt-F7, usually, on Debian-based systems).
This is nice if you have a few always-on Raspberry Pis laying around, and you usually use SSH to remote login and control them, but you would like to have a full desktop environment, not just one app, show up on your local computer.
My favorite is doing this on a windows host with rootless x and having classic gnome on top of my windows desktop 😹
There is also
waypipewhich allows you to run Wayland apps over ssh.deleted by creator
Really? Wayland mentions are getting up there with vegans. We know already, go home!
While I agree Wayland still immature despite decade of development, you don’t have to be a dick when voicing your opinion.
deleted by creator
Just because someone downvotes your comments is not an excuse to lash out to random people.
They aren’t random. They’re the wayland cult followers. People say whatever they want about a band of frothing mouthed cultists doing a downvote brigade. Go suck a toe or something, you need a binky.
Just a handful of downvotes baited you into a flamer and lashed out at any comment mentioning Wayland regardless the context. I never insult you or downvoted you even once and yet you keep dishing out vitriol. To make it worse, you even did it to a wrong person. Do my comment history looks like a Wayland fanboy to you? Seriously dude, you need to chill. Don’t let some trolls turns you into trolls yourself.
Hey, the vitriol for wayland and it’s followers ends when wayland ends or becomes a true full X12… or at a minimum, feature parity with X11, and doing it without other people writing hack add-ons to kluge it to work. Is it dead yet? No? Then why stop criticizing it for it being a huge distraction pulling away the real needed development effort for X?
Three things you can count on. Vegans, Wayland fanbois, and Arch users all telling us about their respective choice. That is being a dick.
As a Windows sysadmin who knows embarrassingly little about Linux, how is the performance? Is it comparable to RDP or better?
The performance isn’t the best, when compared to RDP. Protocols like RDP can take shortcuts by treating it more as an image then a fully remote rendering, like image compression techniques. For tunneling an X-window over SSH, the compression option you have is with the connection, itself. Using say,
ssh -CXorssh -CYallows ssh to compress the connection for better performance, but that compression able to do lossy image compression. The killer will be latency. If it’s over a highly latent connection, like a WAN or satellite, it will be rough. But on a wired lan, or decent local wifi, it’s pretty all right.I should look into it, but I don’t know whether or not X11 provides for any kind of video compression when updating regions of the screen. I only ever use this over a an 802.11g LAN so even if there is no video compression I don’t notice any lag. I haven’t tried using it over the Internet, but I am guessing it would probably be a bit slow.
I just use Moonlight/Sunshine, but my usecase is consistently just streaming my main PC to wherever I am
Don’t forget to
-Cyour ssh for better performance over the wire. It can help a lot.
