GNOME (Wayland) RDP

GNOME's own remote-desktop stack (GNOME Remote Desktop) is GNOME-only. lamco-rdp-server speaks standard RDP on GNOME/Mutter through the freedesktop RemoteDesktop portal and Mutter's Direct API, and the same server also runs on KDE, sway, Hyprland, and COSMIC. This guide is the concrete GNOME setup: install, grant permission once, connect, and fix the GNOME-specific things that trip people up.

Install

Community Edition (any distro): Lamco's own self-hosted Flatpak repository (recommended, auto-updates), the Flatpak bundle attached to the GitHub release, or the Snap Store.

Native (Ubuntu 24.04 / Fedora / Arch): use the distribution package (see the Installation page). GNOME/Mutter needs PipeWire and xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, which ship by default on a GNOME desktop.

Verify the environment before connecting:

Look for Portal (RemoteDesktop + ScreenCast) available and an Encoding backend.

Grant permission once (unattended access)

GNOME shows a portal permission dialog the first time a remote session starts. For unattended or headless use, grant it once and store a restore token:

This triggers the portal dialog, obtains a restore token, and stores it so future connections start without a prompt. Re-run it if you revoke access or change users.

Minimal config

~/.config/lamco-rdp-server/config.toml:

Start it:

Connect

The server listens dual-stack by default, so IPv4 and IPv6 clients both work. Use the host's name (it resolves to whichever family the client prefers) or an explicit address; IPv6 literals go in brackets.

• Windows: built-in Remote Desktop Connection (mstsc.exe) → host:3389, or an IPv6 literal in brackets: [2001:db8::10]:3389.
• Linux: Remmina, or FreeRDP: xfreerdp /v:host:3389 /u:USER (IPv6 literal: xfreerdp /v:[2001:db8::10]:3389 /u:USER).
• macOS: Microsoft Remote Desktop.

Input uses libei by default on GNOME, which is the supported modern path.

GNOME-specific behavior (current in 1.4.5)

• Area capture, so a fullscreen video no longer freezes the session. Mutter stops recording a monitor stream while a surface is handed to direct scanout (mutter#3903), which froze the remote picture for the length of any video. The server now resolves the monitor's rectangle through org.gnome.Mutter.DisplayConfig and records that area instead. Selected by capture.gnome_record_mode: auto (the default, area on a single monitor), area, or monitor. An area stands in for exactly one monitor, so multi-monitor layouts fall back to the monitor stream. The cost is that an area stream always re-composites where a monitor stream blits, and Mutter's area source runs at a fixed 60 fps.
• DMA-BUF capture is attempted, with shared memory as fallback. The GNOME profile no longer forces shared memory. Virtual GPUs are checked for the Venus capset rather than refused by driver name, so a Venus-capable virtio-gpu can take the DMA-BUF path.
• Headless servers can present the virtual monitor as a real display with capture.gnome_virtual_is_platform = true (GNOME 46 or newer, off by default). The compositor's logical scale is now read from the stream as org.gnome.scale on virtual-monitor sessions.
• Multitouch over MS-RDPEI, enabled with input.enable_touch.
• Many sequential sessions, no restart. On GNOME/Mutter the server now uses a per-connection session: it creates a fresh RemoteDesktop/ScreenCast session on each connect and releases it on disconnect. You can connect, disconnect, and reconnect all day. (Earlier versions kept one long-lived session that Mutter's idle timeout reaped a few seconds after a client left, which looked like "it only works once.")
• GNOME 49 input works via a lazy Mutter EIS lifecycle with a kept-alive connection.
• PAM authentication works under the hardened system service (the unit joins the shadow group and keeps full seccomp hardening).

Verified in the 1.4.5 campaign on GNOME 48 (Debian 13), GNOME 49 and 50 (Fedora, Arch), and Ubuntu 26.04.

Troubleshooting

See also: Installation, Configuration, Security, Video Encoding, the Platform Compatibility matrix, and the sibling guides for KDE/KWin, sway/wlroots, Hyprland, and COSMIC.