With this blog I would like to introduce KRdp, which is a new library implementing
the required glue to create a server exposing a KDE Plasma Wayland session over
the RDP protocol. It also contains a command-line based server
which will allow remote clients to control the current Plasma Wayland session.
Remote Desktop Support for Wayland
With the increase in people working from home the past years and other remote
use cases, it has become increasingly important to be able to control a running
computer remotely. While on X11 there are several existing solutions, for
Wayland the choices are rather more limited. Currently the only way of allowing
remote control of a Plasma Wayland session is through Krfb, which uses VNC1
for streaming to the client.
Unfortunately, VNC is not ideal, for various reasons. So to provide a better
experience we started looking at other options, eventually settling on building
something around the RDP protocol. Fortunately, because of the work done for
Krfb and various other projects, we do have all the parts implemented to allow
remote desktop control, the “only” thing left was to glue everything together.
Why RDP?
This raises the obvious question of “why use RDP?”. There were several things
we considered when starting with this. From the start, we knew we wanted to
build upon something pre-existing, as maintaining a protocol takes a lot of
time and effort that are better spent elsewhere within KDE. Especially because
a custom protocol would also mean maintaining the client side. Both VNC and RDP
have many existing clients that can be used, which means we can focus on the
server side instead.
Another major consideration is performance. VNC sends uncompressed images of
the full screen over the wire, which means it requires a lot of bandwidth and
performance suffers accordingly. While I have seen some efforts to change this,
they are not standardised and it is un
