syn-remote

The desktop, from somewhere else. A thin wrapper over wayvnc, plus the parts a wrapper has to add.

syn-remote on                # serve this desktop, now and at every login
syn-remote status            # what it is doing
syn-remote address           # how to reach it
syn-remote listen lan        # the network, rather than this machine only
syn-remote wakeable on       # let a magic packet wake this machine while it sleeps

syn-remote add desk 192.168.1.20 velle   # a machine to reach
syn-remote trust desk        # check its certificate, once, before the first connection
syn-remote connect desk      # open it — waking it first if it is asleep
syn-remote gui | tui         # the same list, in a window or in the terminal

"Wayland cannot do remote desktop" does not apply here

All three reasons that is said are about other stacks. GNOME and KDE gate capture behind a portal that asks a human per session. xdg-desktop-portal-wlr implements ScreenCast but not RemoteDesktop, so portal-based tools can watch a wlroots desktop and cannot touch it. And nothing exists to connect to before somebody logs in — which is true here too, and syn-remote status says so rather than failing obscurely.

wayvnc captures through zwlr_screencopy_manager_v1 and drives the seat through zwp_virtual_pointer_manager_v1 and zwp_virtual_keyboard_manager_v1. synui implements all three for any native client, so no portal is involved and nothing prompts.

What the wrapper adds

A blanked output cannot be captured at all. Once the idle blank stage has fired, screencopy answers failed to copy output — a viewer gets nothing, and there is no frame to click on to get out of it. A connection turns the outputs back on and holds a real idle inhibitor until the last viewer leaves.

It binds to loopback. A port on 0.0.0.0 is reachable by every device on the network; syn-remote listen lan is the deliberate way to change that, and says what it means at the time. Either way the connection carries TLS and a password — wayvnc's enable_auth needs a certificate, a key and a password together, so there is no password without encryption.

The certificate is checked in front of a person. wayvnc's certificate is self-signed, so the first connection is trust-on-first-use: syn-remote trust prints the fingerprint and waits for a yes. Until then the TLS session comes up and is dropped with no error on the machine you are sitting at — the only trace is Client handshake timed out in the server's journal, which reads like a firewall and is not one.

And a machine that is asleep answers nothing at all. syn-remote wakeable arms the wired card for a magic packet and reports what is armed now as well as what will still be armed after a reboot — two different questions, and a machine that is armed today and forgotten at the next boot reads as working right up until the reboot nobody connects to it after. syn-remote wake <name> sends the packet; connect sends one by itself when the machine it is opening is not answering. ⚠ A magic packet is a broadcast, so the machine sending it has to be on the same network as the machine being woken.

Requires

wayvnc, wlopm, gtk-vnc, openssl, python. NetworkManager is optional and load-bearing for one thing: without it the wake flag is set until the next reboot only, and wakeable says so.

Install

git clone https://github.com/velle999/syn-remote
cd syn-remote && makepkg -si

makepkg fetches the source for this PKGBUILD's exact version from this repository's releases, so a clone can only ever build the source it was written against. .SRCINFO lists what it needs.

Where this comes from

Developed in the SynapseOS monorepo, in syn-remote/. This repository is generated from it — the PKGBUILD, a generated .SRCINFO and this README — so issues and patches belong there.

syn-remote 0.1.0-8 · GPL-2.0-or-later