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?

  • FizzyOrangeOP
    1·
    2 days ago

    VNC is horribly slow. Also hilariously insecure! I forgot about that…

    • moonpiedumplings
      1·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • FizzyOrangeOP
        1·
        2 days ago

        Yeah MJPEG isn’t going to cut it, and as you say it’s not rootless.

        • moonpiedumplings
          1·
          2 days ago

          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.