As mentioned above, I have issues setting up remote unattended access for Leap 16.0 (with the KDE/Plasma Desktop). I have recently transitioned from Leap 15.6 with setting up a fresh installlation of Leap 16.0.
The Context
On Leap 15.6 (also KDE), I relied heavily on xrdp combined with xorgxrdp for remote access. This setup was perfect for being able to access my workstation from my Laptop via my VPN network:
Wake the machine remotely via a smart-home power socket and the motherboard set to boot on power-on.
Connect via RDP from my laptop.
Log in to a fresh session via the display manager (unattended access).
The Problem
On the fresh Leap 16.0 install, I was able to install the base xrdp package, but I cannot find xorgxrdp. Without the Xorg backend, I couldn’t get the remote access to work, although I saw the login screen.
I checked the usual X11 repositories, but it appears the X11:RemoteDesktop repo is currently only built for Leap 15.x and Tumbleweed. Leap 16.0 is missing from the build targets:
Local search:
text
$ zypper search xorgxrdp
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
No matching items found.
$
$ zypper search-packages xorgxrdp
Could not search for the package: Error: Registration server returned 'base product not found' (404)No package found
My Questions
Since Leap 16.0 has brought a lot of changes to it, including the ongoing migration to Wayland over X11, I am unsure if the package does not exist yet, or if the standard way of doing remote access is changing.
Package Availability: Is there a roadmap for xorgxrdp coming to Leap 16.0? Or is it dropped as consequence of the wayland transition?
Alternatives for Unattended Access: Has anyone successfully set up a different unattended remote desktop solution on Leap 16 with KDE? I need to be able to start a session from the login screen, rather than attaching to an already running desktop.
KRDP/Wayland status: I noticed krdp is available. However, my understanding is that krdp is currently designed for “Session Sharing” (inviting a user to view your screen) rather than unattended access where the remote user initiates the connection at the login screen. Is this correct, or is there a configuration for KDE that allows it to act as an RDP server for headless login?
Any advice or pointers to specific Leap 16 documentation regarding this would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you for the quick reply and let me elaborate my desired goals / use case:
I have a workstation at home, that’s my main work setup. Additionally I do have a Laptop (a MacBook to be precise, but that shouldn’t be the point) that I mainly use for various web-Apps on the go.
On my workstation, there are some advanced applications installed, ranging from Matlab over special electronic lab equipment control software to simulation software, which need the compute and storage capacity from my workstation.
Although not used on a daily basis, I would like to have the opportunity to fire up these Application GUIs from my laptop and work on them remotely.
As elaborated in my first post, I explicitly want to unattended remote access, after I have booted the workstation remotely.
X is dead, it, and anything that relies on it is never coming back once they’re gone.
Almost nothing. Rustdesk announced they have Wayland support as experimental, xrdp has had an open issue for it for like 2 years now. There is no true Remote Desktop service that supports Wayland right now. There is wayvnc but it is very limited.
Yes, krdp is for screen sharing, but you can sort of do this if you’re willing to make some configuration changes. It won’t be running before you log in so you would have to have the system autologin as a user. You then configure krdp with it’s own user/password combination that is allowed to connect. You probably also have to disable automatic screen locking. krdp/README.md at master · KDE/krdp · GitHub
But basically there is no remote desktop application that supports Wayland right now.
Thank you for the hint. Unfortunately, auto-login is something I would rather not like set up.
I already had an eye on Rustdesk about a year ago, but decided to stick to XRDP at that time. I also do like their approach of providing an OSS alternative to AnyDeks & Temaviewer and I am also open to self-hosting the RustDesk Server.
I was just checking out the documentation of RustDesk, and although they provide experimental Wayland support (for the Desktop?), they still require X11 for the Login Screen: Linux – Documentation for RustDesk
So I checked my current display manager on openSUSE Leap 16.0:
$ systemctl status display-manager
â—Ź display-manager-legacy.service - X Display Manager
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/display-manager-legacy.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2025-12-15 08:42:23 CET; 1h 42min ago
Invocation: 78fcaa276599464fa5c420f4fb5e9980
Process: 1625 ExecStart=/usr/lib/X11/display-manager start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 1652 (sddm)
Tasks: 15 (limit: 56875)
CPU: 2min 54.006s
CGroup: /system.slice/display-manager-legacy.service
├─1652 /usr/bin/sddm
└─1657 /usr/bin/Xorg.bin -nolisten tcp -background none -seat seat0 vt2 -auth /run/sddm/xauth_phKtnA -noreset -displayfd 16
Warning: some journal files were not opened due to insufficient permissions.
… and it is still using X11 by default?
I totally respect the deprecation of X11 in favor of Wayland and I am also happy to find new tools, that do work for me.
Though, I have noticed that on my fresh openSUSE Leap 16.0 installation, the default Window Manager selected during log-in is still X11 (for KDE/Plasma), unless I manually change it to Wayland.
And also the login screen sddm uses X11.
So anything that is gone (like xorgxrdp) is not coming back, but other things are still using X11 (like sddm)?
I am mainly curious, if using Rustdesk - with the limitation of the X11 login screen - is still a “good idea” for now?
I’m not using rustdeck yet, I’ve added it to my list to look into it.
These are two different things. SDDM is happy to launch a Wayland session of any DE, xorgxrdp requires X11 for the session. The difference is important as upcoming releases of GNOME and KDE are going to get rid of the X session entirely making things like xorgxrdp work on less and less systems.
SDDM also does have experimental Wayland support so work is happening there, xorgxrdp will never support Wayland.
I don’t know if it will change anything, but sddm is likely going to be replaced by plasma-login-manager for the Plasma Desktop with the Plasma 6.6 release (if the schedule holds)
I can’t speak for the openSUSE-KDE team as to whether this will apply to Tumbleweed or not, but it’s the direction upstream is going.
I found some interesting information about KRDP in the README file, and I had some thoughts.
Is it possible to start the KRDP server from a SSH session? (without someone beeing logged in graphically)
Also according to the README, the login screen sddm does not support RDP, therefore the issues with auto-login and so on. As @sfalken noted that it will be replaced by plasma-login-manager - which does support RDP - I assuem that unattended access will also come to KDE/Plasma / KRDP natively?
That is exactly what I meant with “it is not as simple as with X11”. With X11 if you control device server (Xserver) you control anything that is using this server and every program shares the same Xserver. You can transparently replace a server that talks to real hardware with a server that talks to VNC/RDP and zero changes in any other X11 client (display manager, window manager, desktop environment etc) is needed (in theory).
With Wayland device server is window manager. So, at the very least your window manager needs support for headless mode (without real hardware). Last time I checked kwin did not really support it. But even with headless support your display manager runs in a different environment (different user) than your user session, so they cannot use the same window manager started by the display manager. You need additional layer between your window manager and VNC/RDP connection and this layer, display manager and window manager need to interoperate to pass VNC/RDP connection from DM (session) to WM (user session).
Which is why it works in GNOME and does not work in KDE - because GNOME implemented both headless mode and support for it in GDM and KDE did not.
wlroots based compositors support headless mode and can be combined with wayvnc, but to my best knowledge they still lack remote login capability implemented by GDM/GNOME.
KRDP shares the existing graphical session, so the answer should be obvious.
If you have the workstation Plasma Wayland session configured to auto login, then you could power it up as you described in your opening post and login remotely via KRdp.
I am pretty much sold to KDE/Plasma, but thank you for the remark nevertheless.