KRFB | Remote Desktop Sharing with Plasma Wayland

This is a kind of follow up to a previous article where I was experimenting with KRDP. Since I was unable to use that reliably, I had to find another solution and that solution has been found. Not as neat and clean as RDP is but rock solid and reliable like VNC has become.

Installation

In the main repositories for openSUSE

sudo zypper in krfb

You can also open it with Discover using AppStream which is pretty cool.

appstream://org.kde.krfb.desktop

First Run

I am a bit mixed the the first dialog box that pops up when you run KRFB. I appreciate that it is letting me know this immediately, but on the other side, I do wish there was a way to automate this process. Maybe there is for unattended machines but I have not yet stumbled upon it but once I do, I will do a stealth-update of this article as though I had the answers right from the beginning.

If you Cancel out here, the application will go no further so you must select Share to activate the sharing of your desktop.

The KRFB application provides a rather simple interface, which is actually quite refreshing, really. This shows an example address, but any address that is connected to your computer will work. Be mindful of your firewall settings in case there are different rules for different interfaces.

The password seen here is only for attended access of the computer’s desktop. This means, the user on the other end must permit the remotely connecting machine to have access.

There is an option for Unattended Access as well. Selecting that option and assigning the password will allow the remote access of the machine without a user having to accept the connection.

Connecting computer

When the connecting computer is using the “attended” password, the user will be prompted with this dialog box. Very clearly, it will show the remote system’s IP, Port along with an option to allow the remote user to control the keyboard and mouse.

When using the unattended password, the user does not get this dialog box and the remote user will be granted control of the computer.

How I am Using It

I am not using this very heavily at this time. I have used this for accessing my main server on the occasion as well as my Framework 13 laptop. These are rather rare occasions is rather rare. I mostly need terminal access into a machine so this is just a capability I want to have when I need it.

What I Like

It’s easy to set up, easy to use. There isn’t any mystery about how it works. The remote sessions are very usable, no major performance lags, even across the internet. It is not as fast as RDP but I really can’t complain about the experience, as far as VNC sessions are concerned.

This is a GREAT solution to have remote access of a desktop with a Wayland session. I only use KDE Plasma as my desktop environment so this will work almost universally for my VNC sessions.

What I Don’t Like

One area that does make KRFB a bit troublesome is that having this in the list of applications that autostart does still require someone to agree to share the session. I have done a bit of searching but haven’t found a workable solution yet but I’m sure there may be one out there. I have a few applications that would require such a capability for some remote machines but I can live with my X11 setup for the time being.

Final Thoughts

I appreciate that solutions for making remote access on Wayland is basically about as good as X11 desktop sessions. I am glad to see that all these things are possible by granting “portals” and such for these remote sessions to connect. The hang up I have is that specific machines I have in place need some sort of automation to make this a seamless solution.

I am very glad I have this utility installed and working well enough. I will continue to learn more about this and other related tools to make accessing my machines even better. Linux is pretty cool.

References

Remote Desktop | KRDP Server with Plasma Wayland
https://apps.kde.org/krfb/