I've had a similar issue recently and I found that rustdesk[0] works pretty well for casual use despite wayland support being labelled experimental. I use it for pair programming with someone on multiple monitors while I'm on a laptop and all the switching and zooming required worked.

[0] https://rustdesk.com/

:) This is a feature of a wayland compositor: I don't want it able to do remote.

It doesn’t have to be like X11. Presumably, it’d be something you could disable if you’d like.

It’d be very handy if we had a performant remote desktop option for Linux. I could resume desktop sessions on my workstation from my laptop and I could pair program with remote colleagues more effectively.

In the past I’d boot into Windows and then boot my Linux system as a raw disk VM just so I could use Windows’s Remote Desktop. Combined with VMware Workstation’s support for multiple monitors, I had a surprisingly smooth remote session. But, it was a lot of ceremony.

OTOH, the enthusiasm for breaking legitimate features that people were using has not helped Wayland adoption.

It is optional: if you want it you will need to select a compositor which does have this expensive feature.

Don't forget, wayland is fully dynamic.

That's one of Wayland's other major faults IMO

It is a major improvement: many real life compositor implementations, discover dynamically the features of the compositor, some will have a remote desktop expensive feature.

I really struggle to believe that remote desktop is expensive to implement/run. And no, this isn't an improvement: It used to be that everyone used Xorg, so all desktops had largely the same features. There was, for example, a way to set keyboard layout that always worked (setxkbmap), and it always worked. Now there are endless different compositors, and they all have different features. Do you want to try a new option? Good luck finding out if it actually does everything you need! Do you need a particular feature? Well, I sure hope you like one of the specific desktops that supports it, because it's a toss-up which support what.

Actually it is a massive improvement: expensive niche features are now optional, features you have to discover and handle dynamically. This helps to avoid developer/vendor lock-in by 'tons of features required'.

If I am not too mistaken there are several "remote desktop network protocols", maybe the dev teams behind them could agree on a common network protocol.

And the more compositor implementations, the merrier, a bit like the x11 window managers.

I am coding mine for linux and AMD GPUs, as a hobby, in RISC-V assembly running on x86_64 via an interpreter (thanks to wayland being an IPC interface)... well until very recently, it has been more some kind of research and development of a "method" to code modular assembly projects with a minimal SDK, in other words to decide on various technical compromises requiring coding _real life_ software in order to hit the right sweet spot.