This is a follow up to my longer previous post where I had a detailed look at how well remote screen sharing works in Ubuntu 24.04 for Wayland desktop sessions. Everything works pretty smooth while connection speeds are high and delay is low. But how does it look like when connectivity is slow? This is an important question for me that needed an answer, because quite often, I do support people behind a slow cellular uplink because they are in a ‘deep indoor scenario’ and no other connectivity is available. So here we go:
To simulate this scenario I used my tried and tested Linksys Wi-Fi router with OpenWrt, and installed the ‘Smart Queue Management‘ package so I could limit uplink and downlink data rates to test different ‘indoor scenarios’. Last time around, I also used the ‘netm’ package to also introduce additional delay. I decided not to do this in this latest test, as I put one side behind an LTE connection, which comes with a slightly additional delay. Also, the SSH gateway I use to connect the server and client was at least 500 km away from each device, which also added some delay. This is my typical setup, so no need to add additional delay.
With all of this said, I ran my first usability test with an uplink limitation on the remote side of 6 Mbps. With such an uplink, screen sharing worked quite well and while I noticed a bit of a delay, it was fully usable to support someone remotely.
Next, I reduced the uplink speed on the remote side to 3 Mbps. At this point, moving windows across the screen becomes noticeably slower. Switching between Windows that are partly overlapping, however, remained fast. This was even the case for windows with a lot of graphical content, i.e. a web browser with a page that has a lot of windows. Typing and characters showing up on the screen also worked without any problems.
And finally, I reduced the uplink speed on the remote side to 2 Mbps. I consider this as the minimum speed encountered in only very few cases in practice. At this speed, moving windows around the screen really gets slow. But switching between full screen windows remains usable. The same is true for typing and seeing the result on the remote screen.
So to summarize, Wayland screen sharing over the RDP protocol with Ubuntu 24.04 on one side, the Remmina VNC/RDP client (on an Ubuntu 22.04 system) on the other side, and an SSH tunnel to a common gateway is a very nice combination for private and secure remote support. Ubuntu 26.04 is at the doorstep and I’m quite certain I can now make the jump from X-window to Wayland!