View a remote desktop with UltraScreen
Wayland Workaround
Like many other screencast and screen recorder programs, UltraScreen fails if it encounters Wayland, the successor of the classic X server. On Gnome, for example, UltraScreen only transmits a black box. In order to be able to use the program anyway, the person seeking help has to log out of the Gnome desktop in this case and then select the GNOME on Xorg option via the gear menu in the login dialog. Doing so launches a Gnome session with a classic X server. To discover whether the desktop is running on Wayland you can quickly type the echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
command.
Conclusions
In practice, UltraScreen proves to be a helpful tool. It does not necessarily require any installation work on the computer of the person seeking help, and there are variants for Linux and Windows, which makes the program helpful in many situations. In the test, the connection setup worked reliably, both with participants on home networks and with users on more restrictive enterprise networks, and did not require any changes to the network configuration of the router, nor did it require the assistance of an administrator.
However, UltraScreen does not yet come close to the feature scope of commercial remote desktop solutions such as TeamViewer;. the transferred desktop cannot be remotely controlled, nor is there any way to communicate with the person seeking help via the application or to transfer files between computers. Nevertheless, the feature set offered will do the job in many situations. Just having the problem right in front of your eyes often eliminates the biggest difficulties.
Infos
- TeamViewer: https://www.teamviewer.com
- AnyDesk: https://anydesk.com
- UltraScreen: https://github.com/w3yden/ultrascreen
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