Good Support For Wayland Remote Desktop Handling On Track For KDE Plasma 5.15

Written by Michael Larabel in KDE on 23 September 2018 at 08:08 AM EDT. 11 Comments
KDE
The KDE Plasma 5.15 release due out next year will likely be in good shape for Wayland remote desktop handling.

The KDE Plasma/KWin developers have been pursuing Wayland remote desktop support along a similar route to the GNOME Shell camp by making use of PipeWire and the XDG-Desktop-Portal. Bits are already in place for KDE Plasma 5.13 and the upcoming 5.14 release, but for the 5.15 release is now where it sounds like the support may be in good shape for end-users.

Red Hat developer Jan Grulich has been working on the KDE/GNOME Wayland screen sharing to a lot of success in recent months, at least with the development code.

This morning he posted to the KDE Phabricator that's tracking the remote access KWin support using PipeWire. He commented, "Screen sharing works just fine with Plasma 5.13 and upcoming Plasma 5.14. There was a major issue in KWayland which will be fixed in KF5 5.51 so we might want to mention this to anyone trying screen sharing on Wayland. We still need some work to be done on KWin side to be able to share just a window, but this is not implement even in Mutter yet. I also still have to finish remote desktop support, which I didn't make to Plasma 5.14, but it will definitely be in Plasma 5.15. I did lots of rewrites in xdg-desktop-portal-kde recently and you can also get screen sharing done through remote desktop portal now. I also did changes in Krfb to support new PipeWire API and to use remote desktop portal to get screen content. What is missing is to handle input in Krfb and pass it to remote desktop portal in xdg-desktop-portal-kde where I miss to forward them to KWayland, this is still all in progress."

The KDE Plasma Wayland support is already in quite good shape, but it looks like in 2019 the KDE Wayland experience may be at complete parity to their X11 support -- aside from NVIDIA GPU support.
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