#231 Boxes dropped VNC functionality: replacement?
Closed: Fixed 2 years ago by aday. Opened 2 years ago by adamwill.

Recent versions of Boxes have dropped VNC functionality. There is now AFAIK no VNC viewer present in the Workstation default install. If we want to maintain that functionality, we should pick a replacement. The obvious choice is GNOME Connections, see https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/pull-request/652 .


Metadata Update from @tpopela:
- Issue tagged with: meeting-request

2 years ago

Metadata Update from @tpopela:
- Issue set to the milestone: Fedora 35

2 years ago

Metadata Update from @ngompa:
- Issue untagged with: meeting-request
- Issue tagged with: meeting

2 years ago

While Connections may bve the obvious choice from a GNOME perspective, maybe we should do the due diligence to look at other options. Remmina comes to mind, I'm sure there's others.

Adding GNOME Connections is mostly approved. Some of us consider it a bug/mistake/oversight that the functionality was removed from Boxes before we added Connections to comps. We do want to talk with @feborges before adding Connections to comps, though.

We also had a long conversation about what we support on the remote desktop server side. Currently we support both VNC and RDP, but we only expose VNC in our UI. We want to strongly encourage use of RDP rather than VNC. But the server end of things is a separate issue.

While Connections may bve the obvious choice from a GNOME perspective, maybe we should do the due diligence to look at other options. Remmina comes to mind, I'm sure there's others.

We discussed Remmina today and concluded that its UI is not suitable for Workstation. Connections is in much better shape.

if that's the plan, I'm committed to implement the missing features in Connections in time for F35. I just haven't prioritized Connections last cycle because other important tasks were more important.

A quick test of VNC in Connections was successful.

I quickly tested RDP but got a crash: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1959447. I didn't actually do anything to enable RDP on the server, though, so there was probably no RDP server running to connect to. Probably need to test the failure cases. :)

Just as a quick note, for openQA's purposes we can't use Connections until https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/connections/-/issues/5 is fixed, so we're using Vinagre for now.

Just as a quick note, for openQA's purposes we can't use Connections until https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/connections/-/issues/5 is fixed, so we're using Vinagre for now.

FYI I just merged the fullscreen feature upstream.

My sense is that Connections is still a bit too immature to include by default right now: we're yet to add onboarding, the user docs are obviously incomplete, and the UI has some obvious polish issues. None of this is a criticism - it's still a very new app and I'm confident that we can get it into good shape.

We also need to come to a conclusion regarding the plan for the server configuration UI, since there's a bit of settings reorganisation being discussed (see gnome-control-center#1095). Whatever we choose to do there will need to be reflected in the Connections UI somehow.

I'm confident that Connections will be a good option for remote desktop and I think that it will be a great vehicle for building a remote desktop story around.

That said, I'm still not fully decided on whether it should be installed be default, based on the fact that it's unlikely to be generally used and could end up being yet another utility app that sits around not doing anything. One answer to that could be to put it into the Utilities folder, though if we did that we might need to do the same for Boxes, to be consistent.

Metadata Update from @ngompa:
- Issue untagged with: meeting
- Issue tagged with: pending-action

2 years ago

@adamwill we just realized today in the meeting that we forgot to note some time ago that we agreed to ship GNOME Connections for F35+. Can you please make that happen? Thanks!

I mean, I guess I could, but seems like it's more of a desktop team job than a QA job? edit: or did you just mean to bump my comps PR and remove the 'do not merge'? Thanks!

edit: or did you just mean to bump my comps PR and remove the 'do not merge'? Thanks!

Yeah this, thanks for handling it already in https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/pull-request/652.

Anything stopping the PR from being merged?

https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/pull-request/652 has now been merged. Let's close this ticket once we've verified that Connections is being pre-installed.

Metadata Update from @aday:
- Issue assigned to feborges

2 years ago

Let's close this ticket once we've verified that Connections is being pre-installed.

I've checked and Connections is pre-installed in the latest F35 nightly.

Metadata Update from @aday:
- Issue close_status updated to: Fixed
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

2 years ago

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