Other desktops

The five desktops

Waydesk desktop. The default: a shell, a launcher and a dock. Debian 13 and Ubuntu 26.04, amd64 and arm64. An idle session takes about 0.7 GB.

KDE Plasma. Tested on Arch with an Intel GPU, and on Debian 13. Install it from your distribution. An idle session takes about 0.75 GB.

COSMIC. Tested on Arch with an Intel GPU. Install it from your distribution. An idle session takes about 0.9 GB.

Omarchy (Hyprland). Tested on Arch with an Intel GPU; Hyprland needs a GPU. An idle session takes about 0.75 GB.

ML4W (Hyprland). Tested on Arch with an Intel GPU; Hyprland needs a GPU. An idle session takes about 1.0 GB.

Choose one

$ sudo waydesk-admin users set anna --desktop cosmic     # or plasma, hyprland, sway, default
$ sudo waydesk-admin config check anna                   # will this account's setup work as a session?

The setting is read when the session starts: end the session or log out first. default follows the server's WAYDESK_COMPOSITOR, which is sway unless you changed it. The other desktops are ordinary packages of your distribution: install the one you want (on Arch, plasma-desktop, cosmic or hyprland), then give it to the account with the command above.

How they run

• COSMIC and KDE Plasma run as one fullscreen window of the session's headless Sway. Their own compositors cannot make a headless output (COSMIC exits without a monitor; KDE's RDP server only shares a session that already exists), so Sway stays underneath and the client sees only the inner desktop. Waydesk bridges the text clipboard to the inner desktop and sets its keyboard layout. An idle session takes about 0.9 GB with COSMIC and 0.75 GB with Plasma 6.8. Three accounts of each of Plasma and COSMIC ran at once, beside Sway and Omarchy sessions (twelve sessions on the i7, idle, on the hardware encoder); capacity under load was not measured.
• Hyprland (0.55 or later) is a compositor of its own, one per account, and needs a GPU. Set it per account with --desktop hyprland or for the whole server with WAYDESK_COMPOSITOR=hyprland. It was tested with Omarchy's configuration: on an i7-7700 with an HD 630, 20 heavy users were admitted before the memory rule refused the 21st, with the render engine saturated from about 8 users.
• The Waydesk desktop (Sway) is the default and the one that is measured most: 21 heavy users on the same i7-7700, limited by memory.

What was not tested

• COSMIC and Plasma under load, and on Debian or Ubuntu.
• Hyprland without a GPU (it has no software renderer and the session will not start).

Arch Linux

There is a package for Arch and a signed pacman repository at https://waydesk.dev/arch for x86_64 and Arch Linux ARM (aarch64); the steps are in docs/ARCH.md. It has the server and the session; the Waydesk desktop packages are for Debian and Ubuntu. On 2026-11-01 the package was installed from that repository on Arch (x86_64, in a container with systemd) and on Arch Linux ARM (aarch64), the services were started and an RDP login got a Sway session. On the same day, on a real Arch machine (an i7-7700 with an Intel GPU), the same package ran Sway, Hyprland (Omarchy and ML4W), KDE Plasma and COSMIC sessions, twelve at once.