I haven’t tried if this works, but I’m pretty confident that this can be made to work. ![]() The way around this with Ubuntu’s built in Wayland desktop sharing is to use the Universal Firewall (ufw) and limit incoming access to port 5900 to localhost. To access desktop sharing, I establish an ssh session and activate port forwarding. it only accepts incoming connections from 127.0.0.1. X11vnc shares the same problem, but I usually run the vnc server in ‘localhost’ mode, i.e. That’s a problem, because VNC only uses 8 character passwords. The first thing that bugged me was that when desktop sharing is activated, it is open to all incoming IP addresses. Fortunately, I found a workaround for each of them: In addition, there are a number of other things that would make my live difficult with Ubuntu’s Wayland desktop sharing. So while I’m glad it works at all, I’m not so happy that some of my major use cases can’t be covered with that solution. This significantly slows down other applications running over the slow remote line at the same time. In addition, desktop sharing takes the full 2 Mbit/s of bandwidth at all times, even if nothing changes on the screen. Even at 2 Mbit/s, responsiveness is considerably worse compared to x11vnc. Anything less and the session becomes unresponsive. So what’s the slowest Internet connection Ubuntu’s Wayland based remote desktop sharing is still usable with? I experimented for quite a while and in the highest compression setting, I could get down as low as 2 Mbit/s. in trains (yes, I do that) is just out of the question at such speeds. Also, connecting to moving devices and quickly changing backhaul speeds, e.g. ![]() While this is no problem in the local network, such data rates are a total showstopper when connecting to a device over a slow Internet connection with 1-2 Mbit/s. Double digit Mbit/s datarates were not out of the ordinary. However, I could already see there and then that the bandwidth requirements are huge. In the local network, this works very nicely and the remote UI is responsive to mouse clicks and key presses. I then used Remmina and its VNC plugin to connect remotely. In Ubuntu 21.10, desktop sharing works in Wayland mode and I could activate it in the settings. Wayland, Desktop Sharing and Ubuntu 21.10 The remainder of this post has a look of the VNC backend of the remote desktop solution of Ubuntu 21.04 and also of the “legacy fallback option” in Ubuntu 22.04. Therefore, head over to my later review of the final RDP based solution in Ubuntu 22.04. The final version of 22.04 LTS uses RDP instead of VNC for remote desktop sharing in combination with Wayland. May 2022: It turned out that my assumption that 22.04 LTS would work the same as 21.10 was wrong. So I got the latest image of that release and continued there. ![]() So I assume for now that in whatever way the current problem will be fixed before 22.04 is released, the result will pretty much look like what is currently built into Ubuntu 21.10. To my surprise, the functionality is totally broken in my daily build, but I’m not the first to notice. However, there are daily builds available, so I download the latest one to have a closer look at the built-in desktop sharing. It’s still early April 2022 so Ubuntu LTS 22.04 has not yet been released. The answer was not as bad as I thought, but also not as good as I hoped. X11 is still supported, but once Wayland becomes the default, I wonder how much love x11 will still get!? So long story short, I was wondering what kind of remote desktop sharing solution Gnome and Ubuntu are proposing for 22.04 and whether it works as well as x11vnc. But now, it looks like Ubuntu will make Wayland the default compositor in the upcoming 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) version. One of the problems that have plagued all attempts so far was the lack of a usable remote desktop solution. That’s a bit of a problem these days, as all Linux distributions that use the Gnome desktop, including Ubuntu, are trying very hard for years now to switch to the newer Wayland display server. As the name implies, x11vnc is based on the x11 display server. And if nothing happens on the desktop, there is almost no data transmitted. There are many VNC servers, but x11vnc is the best I have found so far, as it works well even under extremely severe bandwidth constraints, i.e., it can easily live with 1 Mbit/s in the uplink when using the highest compression scheme. For almost 10 years now, I’m using x11vnc to get GUI access on remote Ubuntu desktops. Desktop sharing is one of the essential things I do every day.
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