Desktop Sharing to work from another computer

Question

Context: I have my personal laptop and my work laptop (both Linux) but I'm tired of the hassle of plugging cables whenever I'm going to use one or the other. So, I want LAN access to my work laptop i.e. share it with my personal one. Btw, I'm a programmer so I'll only be coding, compiling, listening to music, having meetings, and manipulating windows, and I just want a smooth experience. I won't be using very heavy software like Blender, for example.

Because I intend to use this for commercial purposes, I can't use Teamviewer, NoMachine, Parsec, or similar.

I took a look at the current alternatives, tested a few ones, and would like your second opinion/suggestion as well (because I don't want to overthink/overtest stuff even more):

• Gnome's Desktop Sharing looks to work just fine. A coworker of mine uses it but in my case, I use KDE, so I would have to figure out a way of installing it for other DEs or using something else.

• KRDC is super laggy so no, thank you.

• Chrome Remote Desktop works pretty well from what I tested.

• I read about XRDP, TigerVNC, and Apache Guacamole. They might work but I haven't tested them yet.

• Moonlight looks cool and all but because I have an AMD GPU and an Intel Graphics I'd have to use Sunshine (apparently) so I'll try to fix it later.

• OpenNX, X2Go, and FreeRDP look like alternatives as well but I haven't really read what they're about, yet.

Answer 1

So the biggest factor here is whether you are running KDE via KWin (X11) or KWayland (Wayland).

For X11 (KWin): You have a couple different options here:

• TigerVNC - If you want all windows on the remote machine to appear as one window on the local machine, using TigerVNC is a no-brainer.
• SSH Tunnel - If you are going to set it up so that each window on the remote machine appears as a separate window on the local machine, you can just Forward X11 over SSH as explained here.
  • NOTE: This will work for graphics, but if you want to forward the sound you will need to use PipeWire's pulse-tunnel module and PipeWire's zeroconf-discover module.

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For Wayland (KWayland):

VNC - VNC does not currently work natively with KWayland. You could run it on top of XWayland, but in order to run it natively you would have to switch compositors. As you pointed out if you were using Gnome you could use gnome-remote-desktop or if you were using a wlroots based compositor like Sway, Hyprland, qtile, or several others listed here you could use wayvnc.

• SSH Tunnel - You could go this route like with X11 using Waypipe as described here for GUI's and then using the same method I mentioned earlier to tunnel PipeWire via a virtual PulseAudio Sink.

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If you are using KWayland, I would highly recommend just going into KDE's Settings and switching the Window Manager over to KWin and save yourself allot of headache. I personally have only used Wayland under the two wlroots based compositors Hyprland or Sway. I don't know that you get that much benefit from running KDE under Wayland; but then again, I don't ever use KDE or Gnome.