@jjgalvez I’m not sure about what is the use case is for “access the entire desktop environment” that isn’t “share the active session of a user that is currently in their seat”, i.e. technical support or something like that.
I can imagine a few scenarios:
- Run multiple applications: You can do that easily with SSH forwarding, you just need an easy launcher application that you can run initially in the remote connection and use it to launch whatever you want. The
plasmawindowedtesting tool can be used for that purpose (as documented here) - you can even use Kickoff (the Plasma main launcher menu) for that purpose usingwaypipe ssh user@remotehost plasmawindowed org.kde.plasma.kickoff - Run a GUI application persistently so you can disconnect and reconnect. This feature is made available in the X11 world using the Xpra utility, and while there is some effort to add Wayland support to Xpra, a more useful approach is to use wprs. I haven’t tested this yet (it fails to build on my system and I have yet to track down the reason) but this seems promising - you run the application you want, and then you can detach and reattach to the remote connection.
- “Virtual Desktop” - a full working DE that is not local. You treat your local $1000s device as a thin client that is just input and output to a persistent remote workstation that you can connect and disconnect from, and if your local thin client falls to the bottom of the ocean, no one cares because all the important stuff is in the remote (possibly cloud-based) workstation - VDI a-la Shells, AWS Wrokspaces, Azure Virtual Desktop, etc. As far as I know there is no open source solution for that kind of usage, that works with Plasma 6 or at all. I appreciate that this is useful to some people (and therefor a lot of commercial products offer this service), but I personally think this is a bad use case that relies on false premises, and there are better ways to achieve the requirements that currently cause people to reach towards VDI.
Regarding the last point - this isn’t what GNOME calls Persistent remote desktop access (also what @alexvoda and @nl.smart ) linked above), in that the gnome-remote-desktop.service isn’t actually persistent - it is a remote login session kinda like XDMCP: when you connect, a new session is started for you and when your remote desktop client disconnect - the session is logged out.