Q: Remote Support Framework for the GNU/Linux Desktop?

TL;DR; For those (admins) of you who run GNU/Linux on staff computers: How do you organize your graphical remote support in your company? Get in touch, share your expertise and experiences.

Researching on FLOSS based Linux Desktops

When bringing GNU/Linux desktops to a generic folk of productive office users on a large scale, graphical remote support is a key feature when organizing helpdesk support teams' workflows.

In a research project that I am currently involved in, we investigate the different available remote support technologies (VNC screen mirroring, ScreenCasts, etc.) and the available frameworks that allow one to provide a remote support infrastructure 100% on-premise.

In this research project we intend to find FLOSS solutions for everything required for providing a large scale GNU/Linux desktop to end users, but we likely will have to recommend non-free solutions, if a FLOSS approach is not available for certain demands. Depending on the resulting costs, bringing forth a new software solution instead of dumping big money in subscription contracts for non-free software is seen as a possible alternative.

As a member of the X2Go upstream team and maintainer of several remote desktop related tools and frameworks in Debian, I'd consider myself as sort of in-the-topic. The available (as FLOSS) underlying technologies for plumbing a remote support framework are pretty much clear (x11vnc, recent pipewire-related approaches in Wayland compositors, browser-based screencasting). However, I still lack a good spontaneous answer to the question: "How to efficiently software-side organize a helpdesk scenario for 10.000+ users regarding graphical remote support?".

Framework for Remote Desktop in Webbrowsers

In fact, in the context of my X2Go activities, I am currently planning to put together a Django-based framework for running X2Go sessions in a web browser. The framework that we will come up with (two developers have already been hired for an initial sprint in July 2020) will be designed to be highly pluggable and it will probably be easy to add remote support / screen sharing features further on.

And still, I walk around with the question in mind: Do I miss anything? Is there anything already out there that provides a remote support solution as 100% FLOSS, that has enterprise grade, that up-scales well, that has a modern UI design, etc. Something that I simply haven't come across, yet?

Looking forward to Your Feedback

Please get in touch (OFTC/Freenode IRC, Telegram, Email), if you can fill the gap and feel like sharing your ideas and experiences.

light+love
Mike