Remmina not stable on Wayland + workarounds

Tutorials & Guides
1

Remmina comes preloaded with Zorin 18.

It's been hit or miss, sometimes working, mostly not while connecting from Zorin to an Ubuntu v25 PC (black screen).

Research provided that Remmina is poorly compatible with Wayland, which both Zorin and Ubuntu are. This made me wonder why it came preloded with the installation.

Instead I installed NoMachine, which works very well, except not if the remote computer is headless (won't connect) and it needs to be installed on both ends.

Two solutions for the headless problem:

Occasional use, SSH to the remote PC and send the following command to disable the GUI temporarily (resets at reboot) then connect with NoMachine.

  1. Enable SSH on the target machine (have to be connected to it first obviously)

sudo systemctl enable --now ssh
sudo systemctl status ssh

  1. Temporarily turn off GDM and reload NoMachine

sudo systemctl stop gdm && sudo systemctl mask --runtime gdm.service && sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --restart

Long term fix, add a display emulator to the HDMI or Display port of the remote computer to fool NoMachine, I've found a pair 4k 60Hz emulators for $11 on Amazon.

2

You likely did so already, but I don't see it stated in your message, so I ask:
Did you try Remmina running Zorin on Xorg rather than Wayland? Xorg (X11) is a second windowing option included in Zorin 18 that gets along better with many things hardware related.

1 Like
3

I did not try that, it might be another workaround but since I'm using Wayland as default, it would be a bit annoying to switch as well.

4

One more thing, with the display emulator installed, it did not work out of the box for me, I had to update the NoMachine nano file as following on the remote machine:

sudo nano /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg

Then find "#PhysicalDisplays :0" and remove the # to uncomment, then save: Ctl X + y + enter

Restart

sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --restart

5

Just an aside, Wayland is nowhere near ready as advocates keep stating.
I used Remmina remote on Devuan 3 four and a bit years ago to access works private web address to access the server with no issues whilst working from home.