lamco-rdp-server, a Wayland-native Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server built in Rust, releases version 1.4.4 today. This release adds a cross-vendor Vulkan Video encoder, new ways for a client to connect, and broader compatibility across the desktops it already supports.
Product page: lamco.ai/products/lamco-rdp-server. Source and releases: github.com/lamco-admin/lamco-rdp-server.
Other Linux remote-desktop tools either run on X11 directly or add Wayland support onto an X11-first design. Most don't support Wayland at all. lamco-rdp-server is Wayland-first: Memory-safe by construction since it's written in Rust, with no X11 anywhere in its path, and built to reach GNOME, KDE, the wlroots family of compositors (Sway, Hyprland, River, Wayfire, labwc), and COSMIC, each through its own purpose-built strategy rather than one generic approach applied everywhere. 1.4.4 is the fifth release since the product's debut in January.
What's new in 1.4.4
The headline addition is a cross-vendor Vulkan Video encoder: An H.264 encoder built on
VK_KHR_video_encode_h264, Vulkan's own video encode extension, that runs on NVIDIA, Intel,
and AMD alike wherever the driver supports Vulkan Video. It sits next to the existing VA-API
and NVENC paths under one hardware-encoding umbrella, so hardware encoding no longer depends
on which vendor made the GPU.
Also in this release:
- Two new transports: AF_VSOCK for Hyper-V Enhanced Session Mode, and an experimental WebSocket plus RDCleanPath transport for browser and WASM RDP clients.
- GNOME sessions are more resilient, serving one client after another without needing a restart in between.
- A color-rendering fix that reaches the whole wlroots family of compositors, Sway, Hyprland, River, Wayfire, and labwc, at once.
- Continued COSMIC compatibility improvements, including clipboard.
- A fixed interoperability bug: A single wrong constant in the video pipeline could cause Microsoft's own Remote Desktop client to disconnect mid-session when a window was dragged. It's fixed, root cause and all.
Built on IronRDP, and feeding back into it
lamco-rdp-server is written in Rust on IronRDP, Devolutions' open-source RDP stack. Lamco is the largest contributor to IronRDP by any measure, with more than 70 merged pull requests to date, working toward making it the strongest RDP toolkit available on Linux. The graphics and transport work in this release and the work going into IronRDP upstream are the same effort, not two separate ones.
Editions and licensing
lamco-rdp-server ships in two forms: A Community Edition, published directly by Lamco Development LLC as sandboxed Flatpak and Snap builds, is free to use in production. Native packages, through AUR, RPM Fusion, OBS, and Lamco's own apt repository for Debian and Ubuntu, carry the same source-available license, the Business Source License 1.1, and stay free for non-profits, single-server-instance use, and non-commercial educational or research use. Use outside those categories needs a commercial license. Every release converts to the Apache License 2.0 on its own future date; 1.4.4's is 2029-06-01.
Try it
lamco-rdp-server 1.4.4 is available now. Grab a build from GitHub releases or the product page, point an RDP client at it, and connect to a real Linux desktop from wherever you are. For the story behind what it took to ship this release, see the devlog.