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?
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.