HopToDesk Now Fully Supports Wayland on Linux

If you run a current Ubuntu, Fedora, or Debian desktop, you are almost certainly running Wayland. It has been the default session on the major distributions for years. And for just as long, remote desktop tools have greeted Wayland users with the same disappointing advice: log out, switch your session back to X11, and try again.

That advice is now retired. HopToDesk fully supports Wayland on Linux.

Why Wayland was hard

X11 let any application read the whole screen and inject input anywhere. That made remote desktop easy to build, and it is also exactly the security model Wayland was designed to end. On Wayland, an app sees only its own windows. Nothing gets the screen or the keyboard without going through the system's permission layer.

So a remote desktop host on Wayland has to do real work: capture the screen through the desktop portal and PipeWire, the same permission-based path screen recorders use, and deliver input through the compositor's sanctioned channels. HopToDesk now does all of it properly.

What works now

Connect to a HopToDesk host running a Wayland session and you get the full experience:

• Sharp screen capture through the desktop portal, with multiple monitors handled correctly and exactly one mouse cursor on screen, in the right place.
• The person at the machine approves the share the first time in a system dialog. HopToDesk stores the permission token the desktop hands back, so later connections in that session do not ask again.
• Typing that respects the host's keyboard layout. Whatever layout the Linux machine uses, the characters you type are the characters that appear, including accented and non-Latin text.
• Correct modifier keys, so Shift, Ctrl, and Alt behave, and no more stuck keys or wrong-case surprises.
• Two-way clipboard that does not echo pasted text back at you.
• GNOME and KDE are covered, and pointer scaling is handled on less common compositors too.

None of this needs a terminal, a config file, or an X11 fallback. Install HopToDesk, connect, approve the share, work.

Unattended Wayland, including the login screen

The portal path has one built-in property: a person has to be at the machine once to approve the first share, and a machine sitting at the login screen has nobody to ask.

For servers, kiosks, and fleet machines, HopToDesk now has an answer for that too: an optional capture mode that reads the screen at the display hardware level, beneath the compositor. With it enabled, a viewer can connect to a Wayland machine with no consent popup at all, including at the login screen before anyone has signed in. Combined with unattended access, a rebooted Wayland box is reachable again without a walk to the machine.

This mode ships in the standard Linux package but is off by default, deliberately. Consent-free capture is a serious capability, and we think the machine's administrator should be the one to decide it, not the installer. Nothing related to it even listens on the system until an administrator turns on the enable-drm-capture option on that machine. Switched off, it is inert. Switched on, it is exactly what a headless fleet needs.

The bigger picture

Linux users should not have to choose between a modern desktop session and remote access. With this release, the choice disappears: the everyday attended path works cleanly through Wayland's own permission system, and the unattended path is there for the machines that need it, under explicit admin control.

Update your Linux clients to the current version at www.hoptodesk.com/download, and manage all of your machines from the HopToDesk Dashboard. If you run into a compositor we handle badly, tell us. This path only gets better with real-world reports.