Edit: rootless in this context means the remote windows appear like local windows; not in a big “desktop” window. It’s nothing to do with the root account. Sorry, I didn’t come up with that confusing term. If anyone can think of a better term let’s use that!
This should be a simple task. I ssh to a remote server. I run a GUI command. It appears on my screen (and isn’t laggy as hell).
Yet I’ve never found a solution that really works well in Linux. Here are some that I’ve tried over the years:
- Remote X: this is just unusably slow, except maybe over a local network.
- VNC: almost as slow as remote X and not rootless.
- NX: IIRC this did perform well but I remember it being a pain to set up and it’s proprietary.
- Waypipe: I haven’t actually tried this but based on the description it has the right UX. Unfortunately it only works with Wayland native apps and I’m not sure about the performance. Since it’s just forwarding Wayland messages, similar to X forwarding, and not e.g. using a video codec I assume it will have similar performance issues (though maybe not as bad?).
I recently discovered wprs which sounds interesting but I haven’t tried it.
Does anyone know if there is a good solution to this decades-old apparently unsolved problem?
I literally just want to ssh <server> xeyes and have xeyes (or whatever) appear on my screen, rootless, without lag, without complicated setup. Is that too much to ask?
Yes that’s to much to ask
You are adding a ton of overhead and complexity. Expecting it to just work is underestimating the difficulty of it all. With that being said, Xpra is probably what you are looking for. However, I would suggest that you take a look at your use case as there is probably a better solution. What app are you trying to use?
Also, Xorg is a bit of a dinosaur at this point. It isn’t going away but gnome and kde have both made plans to drop support long term. We still have a few years but from a longevity perspective I would start thinking about new solutions. KDE and Gnome both support RDP and there are plenty of modern web interfaces for managing servers like Cockpit.
xrdp and x11vnc is rootless
But both horribly slow.
I highly doubt you can find anything better than XRDP. What do you mean horribly slow? What is the output of a iperf test? What is your GPU?
Sorry I misread, VNC is slow. RDP is a lot better. Does not appear to be rootless though, even though IIRC the RDP protocol does support that? I might have misremembered.
I don’t think that is possible based on what you are asking.
Also rootless is the wrong word for what you are looking for. You are looking to forward a window to the desktop. Rootless is used commonly to describe things like podman
WPRS uses the term rootless like this. I didn’t come up with it. But I agree it is not a great term. If you can think of a better one I will happily use it. Parallels calls it “coherence mode”, which also isn’t great.
Actually Xprs uses “seamless mode” which is probably better.
Proof? And by what metric? That has not been my experience whatsoever, nor have I heard any complaints about either of them.
i just use sunshine if i want to use gui apps. its annoying to setup in a headless server but it works.
the feasibility of this solution will depend on your usecase.
Is it rootless?
it can be set up with root for convenience if you want but its generally meant to be rootless, with autologon, yes.
portals support is pending still so its kind of annoying to set up, and it needs the full desktop stack to be installed on your server, but it isnt rocket science to get started with.
See my edit to the post. I probably should have clarified that.
oh, i get it now. i know X can do it easily and was only aware of waypipe for wayland, but you seem to have had trouble with it.
ill follow this thread because the answer also kind of interests me.
I didn’t try xpra because it’s basically persistent X forwarding, and I already know that is way too slow. As far as I know Rustdesk, etc. are not rootless. I hadn’t considered Moonlight/Sunshine (thought it was just for games) but I would guess that isn’t rootless either?
Its not just for games, you can remote any program(or the entire desktop) with it. Not sure why they advertise it like that.
As for rootless: As far as I know you need some elevated Privileges to be able to capture Wayland, but it does not need to run as root. Not 100% sure though.
Sorry rootless in this context means it doesn’t have a big window showing the whole remote desktop, instead each remote window shows up as if it were a local window. Nothing to do with the root account. Kind of confusing, sorry!
That makes way more sense.
You aren’t going to get the performance you are looking for doing that unfortunately. It just isn’t possible to my knowledge.
I mean it’s totally possible in theory. Do you just mean nobody has actually written something that does this?
It is much more complex and has more overhead. You can do it but it will be slow.
Why do you want it to be a desktop window? Can’t you just run it locally?
Yeah it’s more complex. I don’t think there’s any more overhead though, and there’s no reason it will be slow.
Can’t you just run it locally?
No, unfortunately not.
Ah okay! No its not rootless, in fact it can only do fullscreen I think, thats why Im still searching for a better solution!
Xpra is pretty damn performant. It isn’t as fast as something dedicated but it gets the job done.
Isn’t it just basic X forwarding?
Not really. It uses compression and some custom algorithms to minimize the data sent.
It will have way more performance than a raw X forward
I normally just use X forwarding over
ssh. For simple, X native, apps it usually works nicely, but if you’re using something that draws its own UI (electron apps, browsers and the like often do) it’ll be extremely painful or just fail.I believe there is, or was, a way to run a vnc client rootless, but I think you needed to configure the server in a specific way too. It’s been a long time since I tried though so things will have changed.
I’m using Questa which I believe is a Qt app. Remote X is just waaay too slow. The server is in a different country, but VMware VDI can display apps with no noticeable lag. (But that’s pretty much its only redeeming feature.)
The server is in a different country
You really need to have lead with that. I do what you want all the time, but it’s to another port of the same switch.
Your problem is basically latency. X11 used to run fine on local 10Mb/s networks and that’s no streth these days for WAN connections. What you won’t be able to get past though is latency. How chatty is the protocol.
Anyway, I suggest you try xpra - that was on my list to try at one point but I haven’t needed to. But it is meant to be for what you want and optimised for that. I wanted it so I could disconnect from the machine and reconnect later to resume, but I found it simpler to just do most things in the terminal and use tmux instead. I’ve been happy with that for years now.
You aren’t going to get good performance with just X.
I would look into a dedicated solution like KasmVNC or maybe even Rustdesk with your own server.
Another option is Moonshine/Sunlight but it is mostly gaming focused.
Kasmvnc?
VNC is horribly slow. Also hilariously insecure! I forgot about that…
KasmVNC isn’t really VNC
KasmVNC is basically a completely different solution. It’s browser based, has authentication (although regular vnc does as well), and they’ve made significant improvements to performance by using libjpeg-turbo instead of the normal image libraries.
When using the docker containers (e.g. the webtop linuxservio oned), I noticed no lag for non-gpu accelerated sessions over the internet.
Edit: although it’s not your definition of rootless though.
Yeah MJPEG isn’t going to cut it, and as you say it’s not rootless.
Actually I just realized that’s not true. it is possible to serve a single app via kasmvnc. It’s still web based though.
It’s quite fast, I recommend you try it.
https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ – these are all in one docker containers that include kasmvnc and some apps, but you can also deploy kasmvnc independently.
This might be dumb, but what if you used parsec on the other machine?
Not rootless as far as I can tell.
What are you wanting?
From what I understand, they’re wanting what Cisco does on Windows. Programmes hosted on a server that appear on a remote client when run. Problem is, Cisco is also relatively slow and will never run as fast as a programme hosted on the client machine itself. The biggest hurdle is the network speed of the client.
