On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 2:48 PM Matthew Saltzman <mjs@clemson.edu> wrote:
Hi, all-

I would like to set up a workstation in a network closet with no
monitor or keyboard attached and run a (GNOME shell) desktop session
from another machine on the local network.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/Remoting discusses 3 use cases:

  • * Application remoting - either ssh in and run an application, or some sort of admin-setup
  • wrapper to make a nice wrapper launcher on a remote desktop.
  • * Session remoting - connecting to an existing session and view or control it. This use case covers "helpdesk" scenarios, but also "resume what I was doing at work" (See: Remote desktop and screen casting in Wayland)

  • * Remote login - start a new session remotely

  • It would be useful to know which of these you need.

    Before I retired, from a research institution, linux on local user workstations
    was phased out in favor of VM's in one of the few national data centres.  I
    think this was driven by the need to push updates onto the enterprise standard
    Windows workstations (users could get WSL) as well as concerns over security
    using Xorg on personal workstations.   The servers provide VNC servers, but the
    user experience was poor. Many of the linux users needed high quality visualizations,
    but full color made VNC slow, even over the intranet.  Colleagues my institute
    and other enterprises often found it better to work with one of the systems (RStudio
    Server, Jupyter Notebook) that provides a dedicated GUI in a web browser.  Both
    those examples added a terminal window (enterprises may limit users to
    one ssh session on the server).
     

    What's the best way to do that in Fedora 38, and is there a good source
    of documentation someplace? The GNOME desktop sharing facility requires
    that the connection be to an active session logged in on the console.
    Googling hasn't been much help for recent distros.

    Wayland is not yet ready for Desktop Sharing.  I use a NASA application that consists of 
    Java GUI which runs on Windows, macOS, and linux, and a collection of command-line
    processing programs that run on macOS and linux.  For Windows users the GUI includes
    support for sharing data with a server and running processing programs on remote servers.

    In a mixed Linux and macOS environment, tigerVNC has been reliable for me. following:
    https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-administrators-guide/infrastructure-services/TigerVNC/

    --
    George N. White III