What I’ve seen of rustdesk so far is that it’s absolutely not even close to the options available for X. It replaces TeamViewer, not thin clients.

You would need the following to get viability in my eyes:

• Multiple users per server (~50 users)
• Enterprise SSO authentication, working kerberos on desktop
• Good and easily deployable native clients for Windows, Linux and Mac, plus html5 client
• Performant headless software rendered desktops
• GPU acceleration possible but not required
• Clustering, HA control plane, load balancing
• Configuration management available

This isn’t even an edge case. Current and upcoming regulations on information security drags the entire industry this way. Medical, research, defence, banking, basically every regulated landscape gets easier to work in when going down this route. Close to zero worries about endpoint security. Microsoft is working hard on this. It’s easy to do with X. And the best thing on Wayland is RustDesk? As stated earlier, these issues were brought up and discarded as FUD in 2008, and here we are.

Wayland isn’t a better replacement, after 15 years it’s still not a replacement. The Wayland implementations certainly haven’t been rushed, but the architecture was. At this point, fucking Arcan will be viable before Wayland.

Exactly my point. The issues people consider ”solved” with wayland today will be solved in production in 3-5 years.

People are still running RHEL 7, and Wayland in RHEL 9 isn’t that polished. In 4-5 years when RHEL 10 lands, it might start to be usable. Oh right, then we need another few years for vendors to port garbage software that’s absolutely mission critical and barely works on Xorg, sure as fuck won’t work in xwayland. I’m betting several large RHEL-clients will either remain on RHEL8 far past EOL or just switch to alternative distros.

Basically, Xorg might be dead, but in some (paying commercial) contexts, Wayland won’t be a viable option within the next 5-10 years.

Yeah, the few thousand users I managed desktops for will remain on X for the next few years last I heard from my old colleagues.

Because of my points above

But good that your laptop works now and that I can help my grandma over teamviewer again.

There is actually less to ’xkill’. It nukes the X window from orbit in a very violent manner. The owning process(-tree) will usually just instantly curl up and die.

The main benefit is that it doesn’t actually kill the process, it only nukes the window. As such, you can get rid of windows belonging to otherwise unkillable processes (zombies, etc).

Also, it’s fun. Just don’t miss the window and accidentally kill your WM. (Beat that Wayland)

Now consider that most enterprises are about five years behind that. Takes a few years before what’s available in Fedora trickles down to RHEL, and a few more years before it’s rolled out to clients. Ubuntu is on a similar timeline.

The fixes you got two years ago might be rolled out in 3 years in these places. Oh, and these are the people forking up much of the money for the Wayland development efforts. The current state of Wayland if you pay for it is kinda meh.

I’ll bite. It’s getting better, but still a long way to go.

• No commercially viable remote desktop or thin client solutions. I’m not talking about just VNC, take a look at for example ThinLinc to see what I’m looking for - a complete solution. (Also, it took like ten rough years before basic unencrypted single user VNC was available at all.) Free multimillion dollar business idea right here folks!
• Related to the above point - software rendered wayland is painful. To experience this yourselves, install any distro in VirtualBox or VMWare or whatever and compare the usability between a Xorg DE (with compositing turned off) and the same Wayland DE. Just look at the click-to-photon latency and weep. I’ve seen X11 perform better with VNC over WAN.
• ”We don’t need network transparency, VNC will save us”. See points above.
• ”Every frame is perfect” went just as well as can be expected, there is a reason VSYNC is an option in games and professional graphics applications. Thanks Valve.
• I’m assuming wlroots still won’t work on Nvidia, and that the Gnome/KDE implementations are still a hodgepodge, and that Nvidia will still ask me to install the supported Xorg drivers. If I’m wrong, it only took a decade or so to get a desktop working on hardware from the dominant GPU vendor. (Tangentially related - historically the only vendor with product lines specifically for serving GPU-accelerated desktops to thin clients)
• After over a decade of struggles, we can finally (mostly) share out screens in Zoom. Or so I’m told.

But what do I know, I’ve only deployed and managed desktop linux for a few thousand people. People were screaming about these design flaws back in 2008 when this all started. The criticisms above were known and dismissed as FUD, and here we are. A few architectural changes back then, and we could have done this migration a decade faster. Just imagine, screen sharing during the pandemic!

As an example, see Arcan, a small research project with an impressively large subset of features from both X11 and Wayland (including working screen sharing, network transparency and a functioning security model). I wouldn’t use it in production, but if it was more than one guy in a basement working on it, it would probably be very usable fairly fast, compared to the decade and half that RedHat and friends have poured into Wayland thus far. Using a good architecture from the start would have done wonders. And Wayland isn’t even close to a good architecture. It’s just what we have to work with now.

Hopefully Xorg can die at some point, a decade or so from now. I’m just glad I don’t work with desktops anymore, the swap to Wayland will be painful for a lot of organisations.

Rough start? It’s been over a decade and it’s still rough.

You have FreeIPA if you want a ”product”.

But honestly, if I, as a Linux admin, would do this kind of thing at this scale, I’d probably elect to remain on AD.

Here be dragons. But basically:

• Run a VM from contents of a physical disk: use ’dd’ to create disk image. If on linux, try to boot and fix all the errors, hopefully few.

• Run VM as physical machine: other way around.

You won’t find this in a tutorial. You need to understand concepts, read manuals, fit everything together, execute, fail and retry until it works.

For Windows, I have no idea. Conceptually, I figure it’s similar.

It mostly affects people working with ”fun” enterprise hardware or special purpose things.

But to take one example, proprietary drivers for high performance network cards, most likely from Nvidia.

Stability and standardisation within the kernel for kernel modules. There are plenty of commercial products that use proprietary kernel modules that basically only work on a very specific kernel version, preventing upgrades.

Or they could just open source and inline their garbage kernel modules…

I guess we can formulate a law:

• Stable
• Easy to use
• Up-to-date

Pick any two.

Look, this is the reason people pay RedHat money. Go install Rocky Linux, turn on all the automatic updates and ignore it for the next five years.

On the enthusiast side, NixOS seems to be working fine if you want newer versions of software or larger repos.

Used to? It’s standard practice like everywhere.

ROS

Fly you fools!

I’m assuming you use DisplayPort? Try using an HDMI output if possible.

I both agree with you, and kinda disagree.

If you venture into installing Flatpaks on such a system, just keep in mind that:

• Auto updates must be on
• The Maintainer of the Flatpak in question must be expected to provide security updates for the next five years or so. Personally, I’d only use it for packages provided directly by project maintainers (i.e. Dropbox from Dropbox Inc. as packaged by Dropbox Inc.).

Keep in mind, like 95% of normal people (we are not normal) don’t know what a package manager is and only use

• ”The internet”
• Webmail
• Google Docs
• Spotify

For that, we need the default desktop install and the Spotify app (probably a Flatpak). That’s about it. It’s a glorified web browser with batteries. Treat it that way and keep it that way, unless your SO has any specific needs and requirements.

The limited and dated package set is kind of a feature. Only packages that should work until the laptop breaks, and only packages that won’t change randomly when you update (mostly).

I’m gonna be the boring guy.

RedHat Enterprise Linux. (Or Rocky)

Most boring distro ever. Install it, turn on all the auto updates and be happy. Install something to take backups. Ignore any new major-releases, that laptop will die before the OS hits EOL.

Benefits:

• Boring. It’s their tool, not your plaything.
• Actually works
• Will be reasonably secure over time with minimal effort and manual intervention.
• If any commercial Linux software is required, it will most likely only be supported on RHEL or Ubuntu.
• Provides web browser and word-processing. And we don’t need anything else.

Drawbacks:

• Boring (for you)
• Not ideal for gaming

If you install anything else than RHEL-derivatives or possibly Ubuntu on a machine that someone else will use, you are both in for a world of pain. It has to ”just work” without intervention by you, and it needs to keep working that way for the next 5 years.

Source: Professionally deploying and supporting multiuser desktop Linux to a few thousand users other than myself.