Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

[Posted March 29, 2024 by corbet]

Christian Schaller writes about the desktop-oriented work aimed at the upcoming Fedora 40 release.

Another major feature landing in Fedora Workstation 40 that Jonas Ådahl and Ray Strode has spent a lot of effort on is finalizing the remote desktop support for GNOME on Wayland. So there has been support for remote connections for already logged in sessions already, but with these updates you can do the login remotely too and thus the session do not need to be started already on the remote machine. This work will also enable 3rd party solutions to do remote logins on Wayland systems, so while I am not at liberty to mention names, be on the lookout for more 3rd party Wayland remoting software becoming available this year.

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Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted Mar 31, 2024 4:20 UTC (Sun) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link] (15 responses)

I'm confused by what this is implying: it is only referring to connecting up whatever is needed for VNC/RDP to work again, or is there some new protocol being invented (and does it work with/use waypipe, or is a new wheel being reinvented)?

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted Mar 31, 2024 19:22 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (14 responses)

> it is only referring to connecting up whatever is needed for VNC/RDP to work again

Reading the changelog for the component, that appears to be the case.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 16, 2024 8:17 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (13 responses)

Not sure what you mean by "work again". What didn't work intermittently?

The quote is about something which never worked before:

Before GNOME 46, gnome-remote-desktop only supported connecting to an already-running local (to the remote/target machine) session.

The new feature in GNOME 46 is that it also supports logging in via RDP in the first place. This opens up a lot more use cases.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 16, 2024 9:54 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (12 responses)

It didn't work for a decade or so. With GNOME2 on X11, one could login over the network using VNC.
Everything old is new again.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 16, 2024 21:23 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (11 responses)

> It didn't work for a decade or so. With GNOME2 on X11, one could login over the network using VNC.

...Not from the stock "login prompt". You already needed to have some sort of running login session on the remote system first.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 17, 2024 6:03 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (10 responses)

No, this is about running the remote logging prompt. The protocol utilised was called X Display Manager Control Protocol (XDMCP) and it was supported by GDM in the past.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 17, 2024 13:08 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (9 responses)

> The protocol utilised was called X Display Manager Control Protocol (XDMCP) and it was supported by GDM in the past.

Yes, back in the day when the X server had to run as root.

$dayjob-2 made heavy use of RHEL6 with GNOME2. To get a graphical VNC session, you either had to physically log into the system first and launch the VNC server (I don't recall if G2 had VNC sharing built in back then or not; I gladly ditched G2 when G3.0 landed) or ssh in and manually start an already-authenticated X session with VNC.

IIRC the technical reason why GDM couldn't start with VNC and allow arbitrary logins because the X session/server GDM was using (under a nonprivilged user) was killed and replaced with a new one running as the now-logged-in user.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 17, 2024 14:01 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (8 responses)

Maybe not VNC, but back in the day, your local X11 server could query the network for available remote XDMs. The XDM server could also maintain a list of available XDM servers, and display it to you, allowing you to connect to any of the available XDM servers and login to them.

You did not need to login locally first. You turned on your device (X11 thin client, X11 diskless Unix box, X11 on Linux box, whatever). You got an XDM session, be it a local XDM that gave you a list of available XDMs to reconnect to or a remote XDM. You logged in. It was pretty nice, assuming the network capacity was there.

Things like Sun's "Sunray" protocol and software (sadly, never open sourced) took it further and allowed you to disconnect and reconnect to remote sessions. You could logout of your Sunray, leave work, come back the next day, login to /any/ Sunray and... there was your desktop as you'd left it. Admittedly, leaving my desktop in Europe, travelling to the USA, and then trying to access my desktop on the server in Europe was not really useable. I had to login and start a new desktop on a local server. My desktop back "home" in the European office's server kept running, and would still be there when I got back.

I get this was all based on old, 90s era code and protocols that may have had some issues (security particularly). However, in terms of functionality, for large enterprises, it was very nice.

It's kind of sad to be here in the 2020s, working for large global enterprises, and all that functionality is no longer available. Instead, we now carry a laptop around. And if anything happens to that, while we might have some folders backed up by central IT that may be recoverable, and we may have some of our materials in "Cloud" services, and we may have important stuff in our $HOME (dotfiles, code, etc.) backed up via git to a dev server, we'll still spend a day or more having to re-configure a new laptop to be "just so" and feel just right.

It's a bit sad.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 17, 2024 14:21 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Maybe not VNC, but back in the day, your local X11 server could query the network for available remote XDMs. The XDM server could also maintain a list of available XDM servers, and display it to you, allowing you to connect to any of the available XDM servers and login to them.

Yes, I remember this. I also remember and even back then you were _strongly_ encouraged to not have it exposed to the public internet. Heck, even within your own organization you were nearly guaranteed to be susceptible to shenanigans of the sorts that were quite common on college campuses.

>I get this was all based on old, 90s era code and protocols that may have had some issues (security particularly). However, in terms of functionality, for large enterprises, it was very nice.

Saying that this old code and protocols had "may have had some security issues" is a gross understatement, even before you consider bugs in implementations [1] vs pervasively naive design decisions of the 90s.

> It's kind of sad to be here in the 2020s, working for large global enterprises, and all that functionality is no longer available. Instead, we now carry a laptop around.

I'd wager that for most corporate folks, a laptop is primarily utilized as a thin terminal, effectively an overpriced chromebook given how rarely anything other than a web browser [2] ever gets utilized.

[1] Decades later we're _still_ finding issues with the most battle-tested X implementation there is.
[2] Increasingly, even "native" applications are just the webapp in a dedicated electron-eqsue browser runtime.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 17, 2024 14:27 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Well, it would have been nice to have moved on to a place where we had the functionality without the issues.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 17, 2024 14:25 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Oh, on Sunray: Xpra fills that role very very nicely in the open source world. Works incredibly well. Can be used to launch single apps (seamlessly displaying with your local apps on X11, with cut+paste working betweeen them) or entire desktops.

This is missing for Wayland I think. (Unless you use Wayland just as a backend for X11 - but that still isn't seamlessly possible either, sadly).

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 17, 2024 17:29 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

> Things like Sun's "Sunray" protocol and software (sadly, never open sourced) took it further and allowed you to disconnect and reconnect to remote sessions. You could logout of your Sunray, leave work, come back the next day, login to /any/ Sunray and... there was your desktop as you'd left it.

Windows Terminal Server could also do that. Various "remote desktop" products built on top of VNC or the terminal server protocol are still being sold: https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/all-inclusive/

They work... but they're never quite as good as local desktops.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 20, 2024 9:16 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

Perhaps. Sunray and - even more so - X11 _long_ predate Windows RDS.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 20, 2024 9:20 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Oh, and I think remote network desktops and Sunray got Sun 1 or 2 big enterprise accounts, that would otherwise have gone to Microsoft and Windows PCs. Sun could sell the costs savings in the manageability of their solution (an expensive central IT but with cheapish stateless dumb clients beats stateful, high-maintenance Windows PCs, when the # seats gets to thousands). And perhaps that was a factor in MS developing RDS.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 20, 2024 15:48 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

X certainly predates RDS. But Sunray was released in 1999 and Windows Terminal Server was released in 1998.

There also existed Citrix WinView in 1993 and fully functional WinFrame released in 1995.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted May 20, 2024 15:53 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Ah, indeed. I misread the wikipedia page, and thought it was introduced with Win. Server 2008. Still, it required a (unreliable, high maintenance) Windows PC - missing much of the point.

Schaller: Fedora Workstation 40 – what are we working on

Posted Apr 1, 2024 0:53 UTC (Mon) by Heretic_Blacksheep (subscriber, #169992) [Link]

One of the things I've noticed on my personal desktop: desktop scaling factors for my 4k monitor no longer seem to be using an additional 20-30 Watts on Fedora 40 (beta) versus the same (AMD CPU & GPU) hardware on the much older Debian Bookworm. Apparently they've managed to have similar efficiency with fractional or integer scaling for high resolution monitors as Windows and Mac... finally... Unfortunately, Fedora isn't a good fit for me as a daily. It'll be a while before those changes trickle down to the more LTS type distros.