Hey Open OnDemanders (OODers?),
I work at Cendio, we make ThinLinc, and we also maintain noVNC. The noVNC in your interactive desktop apps is mostly on us, so we understand the scare many of you have regarding the future of remote desktops, Wayland and all of that. At GOOD Conference 2026 @alanc put me on the spot on stage about current remote desktop solutions not working as expected with RHEL 10 desktops. My answer was roughly “uh.. it’s an easy fix right now, but the future is complicated”. So here’s the slightly longer version…
WHAT
The desktop environments are dropping X11. GNOME 50 removes the X11 code from Mutter, KDE Plasma 6.8 does the same in KWin, and more will probably follow. The distros mostly follow the DEs, which is why it’s also easy to mix up terminologies of ‘distro’ and ‘desktop environment’. EL10 ships GNOME without the X11 session files and without an Xorg server, and XFCE and MATE aren’t in EPEL 10. So it’s less “RHEL 10 broke VNC” and more that the desktops you’d want to run inside a VNC server are moving away from X, and EL10 is just where most people notice first.
Why can’t the VNC server just do Wayland then? With X11 the VNC server can simply be the X server (such as TurboVNC for OOD), and any DE can run on top of it without even knowing it’s remote. Wayland has no separate display server to swap out, the compositor is the display server. GNOME has Mutter, KDE has KWin, sway and labwc build on wlroots, and each of them handles headless sessions its own way, if they even handle it at all. So instead of one VNC server that works with every desktop, you’d have to write and maintain a separate integration for each and every compositor. Neither pretty nor sustainable.
And OOD desktops are pretty much the worst case for this. A batch job on a compute node, no monitor, nobody there to click “allow” in a screen sharing popup, a bunch of users on the same node. That’s a headless session, and today there is no standard way to start or drive one on Wayland.
NOW
The shipped desktop app is noVNC in the browser, websockify in the middle and TurboVNC on the compute node. noVNC only speaks VNC and doesn’t care if there’s X11 or Wayland on the other end, so nothing has to change on the browser side. It’s the server end that’s the problem. The stock setup needs an X11 desktop running inside TurboVNC’s X server, so the question is really where you can still get one.
- Keep the desktop nodes on EL9 for a while. It’s maintained until 2032, XFCE and MATE are in EPEL 9 and the desktop app works as is. Boring, but it works.
- On EL10, GNOME still has its X11 support, Red Hat only removed the session files and the Xorg server. We run it in ThinLinc’s Xvnc, see "No X11 desktop environments installed" error on RHEL 10, AlmaLinux 10, and Rocky 10 - Knowledge Base - ThinLinc Community Forum It should be the same story with TurboVNC’s X server. This only buys time though, since GNOME 50 has no X11 left at all.
- If you want Wayland already, the VNC server has to hook into the specific compositor, as mentioned above. Lots of people are playing with this, @Micket for example, see Desktop changes for RHEL 9 to 10 migration
- Build the desktop yourself. TurboVNC brings its own X server, so on EL10 what’s actually missing is an X11 desktop to run in it. XFCE and MATE still build and run fine on X11. It won’t rescue GNOME 50+ or Plasma 6.8+ though, the X11 code is gone from those upstream, not just left out of the packages.
So whichever way you go, be careful planning around GNOME 50+ or Plasma 6.8+ for a VNC desktop app until the Wayland side has caught up (which it will, sooner or later 
).
FUTURE
Samuel Mannehed, the CTO for Cendio, just published a longer post on this: Bringing headless remote desktop to Wayland - Blog - ThinLinc Community Forum
There’s a draft spec called RemoteDesktop1 that lets a remote desktop server talk to a headless Wayland session through one API. We’re working on it with Jonas Ådahl (GNOME), we’re funding a KWin implementation with TechPaladin, and a wlroots prototype is in the works. If enough compositors implement it, one VNC server could work on any compositor that implements it, headless, with no popups. That includes whatever VNC server your desktop app happens to use, it’s not a ThinLinc thing.
There’s also a second XDG spec draft for how to start a headless Wayland session in the first place.
No dates, sorry. Much of it depends on other projects than ours. Feel free to ask us anything, either here, on the ThinLinc community forum or in the upcoming Open OnDemand Tips and Tricks - Americas on November the 5th.