Wayland headless multi seat?

2026-07-28 23:50 UTC

I’d like to try to get fedora to host a second headless Wayland session in the background for a remote user. I have a GPU but I want to share its render and compute, not the physical HDMI output, so I need a virtual Wayland session for the second seat. Supposedly logind could handle the seat and udev permission issues clean enough, but headless use is still beyond me there. I’d like a KDE Plasma environment running headless and then sunshine can just stream this session out using the war capture method. I just don’t know how to start up a separate Wayland session under another linux user in the background with a plasma session drawing to an imaginary monitor. There seem to be 2 ways of doing this. wlheadless-run - a young project made to solve this particular problem kwin --virtual can theoretically do this, but I’m not finding clear examples of it

Replies (1)

@Shayeta@feddit.org 2026-07-29 05:42

I was investigating this some time ago when I wanted to remote login into my work PC on my local network so that I didnt need a KVM or multiple monitors and peripherals. Fundamentally this works great in X11 because the core required for this is implemented in X11. Meaning it was easy to create software for this use-case no matter the DE. Wayland is much more “hollow” in this regard. A lot of features that were core to X11 have been offloaded to the window manager. And by offloaded I mean “we do not handle this stuff, figure it out DE devs!” This means that for what we want, the DE itself needs to implement it. Gnome does have a remote login feature that might fit the bill. KDE has made 0 attempts at implementing it. Not sure where the rest stand.

Open ##4184024