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11 months agoOnly the Tailscale pairing server is proprietary but there’s a FOSS self-hostable alternative called Headscale.
The Tailscale clients are FOSS.
There isn’t much of a guide, you install the Tailscale clients and make an account on their website. After you enroll your devices to the account with a code they’ll be able to access each other via private IPs on an encrypted network based on WireGuard.
You can connect among devices with unsecured protocols like VNC because they’ll be inside the encrypted network. And this works with any app and any protocol not just remote desktop — you can use Syncthing, access files, access any services you want securely etc.
Things like desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop etc. are incredibly broken, with no hope in sight because the core design of Wayland simply didn’t account for them(!?), apparently.
Add to that the decision to push everything downstream into compositors, which led to widespread feature fragmentation and duplicated effort.
Add to that antagonizing the largest graphics chipset manufacturer (by usage among Linux desktop users) for no good reason. Nvidia has never had an incentive to cater to the Linux desktop, so Linux desktop users sending them bad vibes is… neither here nor there. It certainly won’t make them move faster.
Add to that the million little bugs that crop up when you try to use Wayland with any of the desktop apps whose developers aren’t snorting the Koolaid and not dedicating oustanding effort to catching up to Wayland – which is most of them.
I cannot use Wayland.
I’m an average Linux desktop user, who has an Nvidia card, has no need for Wayland “security”, doesn’t have multiple monitors with different refresh rates, uses desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop on a daily basis, and uses lots of apps which don’t work perfectly with Wayland.
…how and why would I subject myself to it? I’d have to be a masochist.