Supporting org.freedesktop.RemoteDesktop1

[Aleix Pol]

Makes sense  to iterate. It's a bit weird to add it on top rather than
deprecating other approaches but I guess time will tell.

I see this doesn't seem to go through XDG Desktop Portal like the
former one. Will this one be fine for flatpak apps? I see the spec
distances a bit from the use-case but it makes me wonder what the
use-case looks like:
Is it for services that come from your OS? Then it needs to be a
service that either we provide or someone puts it in the system
alongside ourselves. What would it look like for e.g. rustdesk or
anydesk to support this?

Aleix

On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 5:09 PM David Edmundson
<david at davidedmundson.co.uk> wrote:
>
> 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