Headless gnome-remote-desktop on NixOS

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Hello all, working on trying to set up gnome-remote-desktop (via wayland) with a headless monitor using RDP: Add support for virtual monitors + enhance hardware acceleration support (!69) · Merge requests · GNOME / gnome-remote-desktop · GitLab – while the GUI interface is not yet configured, there is a gsettings key that can be set.

However, even on GNOME 42 on nixos-unstable, even with gnome.gnome-remote-desktop specifically installed (just to make sure I’m not missing the obvious answer), the org.gnome.desktop.remote-desktop.rdp screen-share-mode key appears to be nonexistent, which upstream suggests means a misconfiguration or incorrect install of the package.

Does creating this key require an adjustment to the nixos modules themselves or is this something I should be overriding on the user side?

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NixOS intentionally does not expose GSettings schemas globally to avoid conflicts. Each program is expected to have the schemas it needs passed to it through XDG_DATA_DIRS by wrapGAppsHook.

Of course, the corollary is that you can no longer edit system-wide settings. It would be possible to modify gsettings and dconf-editor programs to scan the system for schemas as described in gedit gsettings schema not reachable · Issue #33277 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub but for now, you can get access to the schemas with nix-shell:

nix-shell -I nixpkgs="nixpkgs=channel:nixos-unstable" -p glib gnome.gnome-remote-desktop --run 'XDG_DATA_DIRS=$GSETTINGS_SCHEMAS_PATH gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.remote-desktop.rdp screen-share-mode'
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Excellent. Many thanks!