Hey, no pressure but any chance the community can get a sneak peak or heads up as to what the new features or fixes will be that are coming with the new thinlinc version(s). And if possible any ETA or release date? I use Thinlinc alot (it’s a great tool) and I’m curious if some of my pain points will be resolved in upcoming versions as well as to understand the general roadmap of development!
Hello @blacksnow
We generally don’t have a fixed release dates. We strive to have a new release twice per year, and has been fairly successful in delivering on that throughout the years. This release is an exception to this, since we’re doing a graphical overhaul, everything including our website, the native client, webclient and server installer. That, together with the regular tweaking, fixing and introducing new features, has put this release behind the normal schedule a fair bit, to say the least.
(A sneak peak of the new graphical profile can bee seen in the Nightly Client build)
We’re very close to a final release of 4.15.0. But first we need to get the beta out, which is expected to happen (hopefully) during July. If nothing unexpected comes up during that phase, we can make the final release some time after that. We have no fixed date to communicate at this point.
Could you please elaborate a bit what you consider to be pain points?
Regards,
Martin
This is literally the best news I’ve heard all day, and thank you to you and the Cendio team for all the hard work. So primarily my use case revolves around improving my compute capability, I travel a lot and do a lot of development work (coding, compiling, AI/ML development/testing, and CI/CD work). I’ve adopted the “my laptop is nothing more than a screen” paradigm and as such here are the main issues I face.
- Profile Saving, I think this has probably been mentioned elsewhere on the forums.
1.a) Switching between multiple logins and remembering all the hostnames is a bit tedious. I don’t really care about password management so much but I would prefer to have a dropdown of previous hostnames I’ve connected too.
1.b) Setup a default screen resolution for newly initialized sessions per profile.
1.c) Drive/Sound/Clipboard options per profile, for example on some connections I don’t want to have my drives connected, nor sound transferred, nor clipboard sharing capability for security reasons or otherwise.
1.d) Possibility to separate transferring local microphone and remote sound? In some cases I want to hear the remote system’s sound but I don’t want to transfer my microphone. Again for security reasons and bandwidth. - Virtual GPU integration. I know this is not really on you guys as there are a bunch of 3rd party integrations that are possible although annoying to setup and come with security risks if you ask me.
- Larger screen resolutions seem to require exponentially larger amounts of CPU to drive them. 1920 HD is like 1-5% on my 5975WX and then going to 4k is around 30% (this is with just 16 vCPUs allocated). This is with nothing happening, not playing videos or anything like that just having windows open. Not sure if this is ThinLinc or LLVM issues. Looking forward to whatever performance benefits come in the new versions.
The following aren’t really pain points but some oddities or maybe bugs I’ve noticed.
- When you type just a username into the web client and click next, it then prompts you for a password but even if you enter the correct one it still fails to connect.
- Doing something like sudo reboot/shutdown now force closes the client and you get two thinlinc client messages about the closure. One about the session dying improperly and another about the session being closed, seems like you should just get one message.
Thank you for the feedback, it’s valuable to hear about them.
Regarding 1, the web client. This is not something I was able to reproduce on 4.14.0. If I leave out Password and click “Login” it will simply try to authenticate me without password, and prompt
“Authentication failure.
Please check your username and password.”
a Shutdown of the server only prompts my client once:
What client version are you using?
/Martin
I’m using 4.14.0.
Webclient Issue: (Use on a system that has a password)
- Open webpage and just type in the username.
- Press login with the password field blank.
- Another page opens asking for the password.
- Provide password and press next.
- Authentication failure is seen.
Some example screens from a quick setup through the webclient using 4.14.0.
I can’t replicate the other issue right now but once I can I’ll take screens.
Alright, I see what you mean. This would indicate that your PAM configuration prompts for the password again. So, you would need to dig through your journal logs and see what’s going on there.
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Hi @blacksnow!
While this might not be precisely what you are looking for, I think it might help; you can create shortcut files with separate configurations for different hostnames. The files could, for example, be server1.tlclient and server2.tlclient and effectively work as different profiles. Files ending with .tlclient are associated with the ThinLinc client.
- Create an empty file with the suffix “.tlclient” (*).
- Double click it to open the ThinLinc client.
- Make any changes you want to the settings.
- Connect to your server.
- The username, hostname, and settings are now saved to the shortcut file.
- Repeat steps 1-4 for other servers or settings.
(*) Note that GNOME has a bug preventing file associations for empty files from working. If using GNOME/Nautilus, you can work around this issue simply by adding a space to the .tlclient file after creating it. 7301 – empty .tlclient files are not associated at all
1.d) Possibility to separate transferring local microphone and remote sound? In some cases I want to hear the remote system’s sound but I don’t want to transfer my microphone. Again for security reasons and bandwidth.
I see your point, it is a good idea. I added a feature request entry to our systems for this. However, I don’t think a fix can be expected in the short term unless we see more user interest.
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