Running Waypipe on Microsoft Windows?

Ask Fedora
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Waypipe has amazing performance and reliability on Linux clients and it’s a fantastic solution for my remote access Fedora Server where users only need to launch a single application. Keeps server load low too, as it’s resource-constrained.

But some Windows users need to access the server too. Since I can’t use g-r-d right now, I decided to just create a Fedora Workstation 40 VM in Virtualbox and setup a bunch of Waypipe bash scripts for various users on it that can just be clicked on and the application window will launch. Performance and reliability is still great even under a VM.

But it would be really nice if Windows users could just launch the application directly on their machines without needing to use a Linux VM to do so as it’s a heavy-duty solution and weighs on the host’s resources.

Is there a way of doing that? Maybe through WSL?

Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager somehow managed to integrate X2Go a few years back: New Add-On Aboard: Welcome X2Go! - Devolutions Blog

I guess this forum is kind of a weird place to ask, but I figured this was as good a place to start as any…

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Turns out this is pretty easy!

  1. Run wsl --install on an up-to-date Windows 10/11 client in Powershell with Admin rights.

  2. Reboot.

  3. Open Ubuntu in Windows Terminal and install Waypipe.

  4. Generate an SSH key and add it to the server.

  5. Run waypipe ssh user@server firefox and you’ll spawn a Firefox window!

It doesn’t seem to do fractional scaling though. As a workaround, if you’d like 175% scaling instead of 100%, create a .wlsgconfig file in either system/user directory (depends on installation) with this content:

[system-distro-env]
WESTON_RDP_DISABLE_FRACTIONAL_HI_DPI_SCALING=false
WESTON_RDP_DEBUG_DESKTOP_SCALING_FACTOR=175

Restart WSL with wsl --shutdown and run Waypipe again.

Of course, this will look completely wrong if you drag the window to a different resolution monitor. And regardless, the resulting window will be blurry.

I don’t know why WSL hasn’t figured out fractional scaling with Wayland yet…I don’t think X is involved at any point. Maybe a limitation of RDP?

Oh well, problem solved.

Edit: The limitation is in Weston. They haven’t gotten fractional scaling yet: Add fractional scaling support (!1) · Merge requests · wayland / weston · GitLab