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[BryanC]

I happily use GNOME on all of my work machines, but it's not designed well for HTPC use where the TV is being used as a secondary display. I need the ability to remote desktop into the session and not disrupt playback on the TV (secondary display). Unfortunately, GNOME zooms out the secondary display whenever the Activities Overview is activated on the primary display (among other oddities).

Has anyone had better luck getting an HTPC setup with KDE or Sway? I know I can do this with XFCE or i3 (I've set it up this way before) but I'd like to stick to Wayland DEs as that is where most of the development work is being done.

[Mike Noe]

I'm using that setup on a Tumbleweed box with Plasma5 Wayland.  5.22 is good, but 5.23 (beta) is much more stable so far.  I'm on AMD GPU.  I do have some weird issues with MC and menus, which I *think* is fixed with a soon-to-be-merged commit for Kwin5.23.

I'm using krdc as the remote desktop client and I haven't seen issues with the "zooming" you mention, but occasionally there is some image corruption which happens with XWayland apps.

[BryanC]

I think I may try out Fedora Kinoite then. I was starting to monkey patch GNOME 40 to make it behave better for HTPC use, but the update to GNOME 41 has already demonstrated that it's too complex to maintain extensions in that ecosystem. I hardly interact with my HTPC so it's not that big of deal for me, I just need something that is capable of dedicating a "second" monitor (my primary monitor is a dummy plug display that I remote desktop into) to Theater View without interrupting playback.

The "zooming" I'm referring to has been the design of GNOME since version 40. They've decided to assign each display its own activities overview (a GNOME concept) and the Super key activates all of them simultaneously. This makes perfect since for a workstation but not for a HTPC, where I want to interact with the machine using remote desktop on the primary display without disturbing Theater View or whatever is playing on the second display (TV).

Coincidentally, when I last tried KDE in a VM I could never seem to get remote desktop to work at all on Wayland so I'm glad to hear it works for you. I basically just need to be able to control the MC interface remotely, so as long as that works I'm golden.

[mwillems]

One thing worth thinking about might be whether wayland is an ideal choice yet.  MC is an X11 native application, so running it on wayland just introduces an extra layer of potential issues through xwayland.  For example, I see noticeably better MC interface and video performance on X11 than on wayland even using the same DE (i.e. using Gnome with wayland and Gnome on X, Gnome on X gives a better MC experience). 

I know that's outside the parameters of your question, but if you haven't A/B'ed JRiver's performance it might be worth a look to see if Wayland is worth the haircut (or if performance is equivalent in your case). 

[BryanC]

Intriguing option: https://ubuntu.com/blog/canonical-launches-ubuntu-frame-the-foundation-for-embedded-displays

[InflatableMouse]

No one mentioned driver problems. Both Nvidia and AMD are having trouble delivering a trouble-free experience on Wayland. I don't know about Intel.

As far as Im concerned Wayland isn't ready for a daily driver with proprietary drivers. Maybe with the open source drivers, I don't know. I don't use them.

[Awesome Donkey]

In my experience AMD's drivers have the least amount of issues with Wayland (because AMDGPU drivers are part of the kernel/Mesa), but yeah, you'll be encountering some kind of issue/quirk with every desktop environment.