At my university, I currently run a linux terminal server which provides remote linux (Xfce) desktops to the Windows PC’s of our students and faculty using xrdp. We are very happy with xrdp and its features, but it is X only, no way to move to wayland at all.
I’m investigating ways to switch to wayland, and I try to get an idea if switching to wayland will be possible now, in some months, or in some years at best.
Of all wayland RDP solutions, Grd is closest to what we need.
As far as I can tell from the documentation, Grd supports
- Multiple virtual remote desktops with no physical screen (headless).
- PAM-based user authentication.
- Session management with separate per-user sessions.
- Persistent sessions (users can disconnect and reconnect).
Is that correct?
However, I was not able to verify the following features (which xrdp offers and which we depend on) from Grd’s documentation:
- Does Grd+Gdm fully support non-Gnome desktops (Xfce, KDE, …)?
- Does Grd require graphics/video hardware on the server side (and share it between all users / sessions), or will it also work with software rendering (and software video codecs) only (no graphics HW in the server)?
- Does Grd support two-way clipboard sharing (copy & paste) between the client (Microsoft Windows RDP client) and the wayland session? Only text or also files?
- Does Grd support client local drive sharing with Microsoft Windows RDP clients in the same way as xrdp does? (using their RDP connection, remote users can access the local drives, USB sticks etc. of their Windows clients as subdirectories in their homedir on the linux server: The client’s drives are automatically mounted as fuse filesystems with correct ownership and protection on the server).
- Are national charsets and national keyboard layouts on the Windows clients handled correctly?
What is already working in Grd? What is planned? When?
What will not be supported in the forseeable future?