I have two systems right next to each other. One of them doesn’t have a monitor attached and it’s not simple to do so. They are both on the same 1Gbps LAN.
I’m currently using FreeRDP/xRDP to remote into the other system, but the latency is just terrible. I’m able to deal with it, but in some circumstances (like if dynamic ads or videos autoplay on websites) the latency just skyrockets to a a frame very few seconds. The remote system is Kubuntu 20.04 using X.org and not Wayland. I have just about every window decoration turned off or down. And just about every setting I can find to increase performance. The connection settings are the best they can be (I’ve looked through so many guides and posts about increasing performance), and they have helped a bit, but it’s still far from ideal.
I’ve even tried VNC and AnyDesk and they’re both just as bad, which is odd because I’ve connected to my brother’s system in another part of the country on many occasions, and even when he loads up a Youtube video the connection and latency is buttery smooth.
Does anyone here have any recommendations or suggestions on what I can use or do to improve the connection quality?
X11 forwarding can be amazingly fast and due to its nature the integration is amazing. I mean that’s basically its whole purpose. If you can secure your network you can run it unencrypted for best results or over ssh if not.
If you need full desktop sharing VNC is probably the fastest of all solutions I tested. It’s barely not fast enough for games, but otherwise it does a great job.
I thought about this, but would I be crazy to forward an entire instance of plasma? Is that even doable or is that just asking for problems?
For a number of reasons I want to keep a separation between my host system and the remote system. I have a specific workflow on the remote system (like apps in the taskbar, etc), and I would like to keep that. But it’s not impossible to adapt to a new workflow.
One issue I can envision, is that I use Teams on that remote system for screen sharing and calls. I really don’t want to futz with audio redirection. I have headphones plugged into the remote system and I use direct audio.
I don’t know that you can forward an entire instance of plasma. I might be wrong, though. Not sure.
If you want to be able to connect to already-running applications rather than run them originally via the SSH connection, you might be interested in Xpra.
As far as keeping your environments separated, I’d probably recommend a second xorg-server on a different… what do they call them… not virtual terminals. ctrl+alt+f1/ctrl+alt+f2/etc things, though. (Or even a separate virtual desktop.) And just designate ctrl+alt+f2 as your “other system desktop”.
I think it’s possible, but I think it’s one of those things like printing a website screenshot, scanning it, and emailing it.
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
I know what you mean. You’re thinking of a display server. That’s what xRDP does on the remote system. Although for whatever reason I can’t log in to the remote session if the local display server is logged in. But that might have something to do with how Plasma handles authentication. I haven’t tried with another DE.
That’s a difficult question to answer. My intuition tells me that it does not work, because 2 desktop sessions would fight with each other. The applications you export are managed by the local window manager therefore the concept of exporting a whole DE doesn’t really make sense. I don’t know the answer though and it’s just my guess.
What the other answer proposed might be possible though. Take another tty and launch another X session there. It can even be another DE than your primary one. There you can have your own session with its own windows etc. I know for sure that this does work, but you might run into problems if you use Nvidia (at least it was the case a few years ago).