Changes/WaylandRemoteDesktop

Wayland Remoting

Summary

Support desktop sharing under Wayland, with the same features and integration as under X11.

Owner

• Name: Matthias Clasen, Jonas Adahl (mutter, gnome-remote-desktop), Wim Taymans (pipewire), Carlos Garnacho (control-center)
• Email: mclasen@redhat.com
• Release notes owner:
• Product: Workstation
• Responsible WG: Workstation WG

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 29
• Last updated: 2018-06-14
• Tracker bug:

Detailed Description

We want to support desktop sharing under Wayland in the same way as under X11, by exporting the desktop via VNC. We aim to support authentication, authorization and encryption.

Benefit to Fedora

Desktop sharing has been a long-standing feature of Fedora Workstation that we've lost with the switch to Wayland. This change brings it back.

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • Implement encryption in libvncserver (see https://github.com/LibVNC/libvncserver/pull/234 )
  • Implement passphrase support in gnome-remote-desktop
  • Implement user querying in gnome-remote-desktop
  • Add gnome-remote-desktop support to the control-center sharing page
  • Install gnome-remote-desktop by default
  • Make pipewire socket-activatable

• Other developers: Nothing
• Release engineering: Nothing
  • List of deliverables: N/A

• Policies and guidelines: N/A

• Trademark approval: N/A

Upgrade/compatibility impact

If an upgraded system had desktop sharing enabled and is using the desktop session, the setting will now be respected (ie the desktop will actually be shared).

How To Test

Log into a Wayland session on Fedora Workstation. Enable desktop sharing. Verify that it works by connecting from another system. Test the options for user/passphrase/encryption as well.

User Experience

Desktop sharing works as it used to.

Dependencies

We need changes to the systemd configuration (socket-activation for pipewire), and we need changes to libvncserver (for encryption support).

Contingency Plan

If we don't get all the required changes in, we can support desktop sharing with a more limited feature set (e.g. without encryption).

Documentation

The existing documentation for desktop sharing applies.

Release Notes

Desktop sharing via VNC is now fully supported under Wayland.