Supporting org.freedesktop.RemoteDesktop1

David Edmundson david at davidedmundson.co.uk
Tue Sep 1 16:09:03 BST 2026


People at Gnome have reached out to be with regards to making a new
standard to make it easier to develop remote desktop headless
software. (i.e an RDP server, etc) with support from companies that
develop this type software for enterprise use:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/merge_requests/115.
There is also a Matrix room.

In general, it's very similar to the Remote Desktop portal, but with
some subtle differences with regards to permissions and control.

The main motivation for doing this elsewhere are that semantically
this is for when we want to give full control; position monitors  (and
disable local control), control keyboard layouts (and disable local
control).

In general KDE's goal is to make as many client applications work as
best as possible, so given we're not going to get Gnome to implement
ext_data_control or matching wayland protocols, supporting this seems
sensible. It's nice that they've reached out.

It's mostly a job of proxying one API to existing KDE API which is
something we can relatively easily encapsulate. David Redondo and I
have started initial work at:
https://invent.kde.org/davidre/xdg-remote-desktop-kde with the
intention of proposing it to Plasma as the standard is more
formalised.

David


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