ThinLinc 4.21.0 beta

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ThinLinc 4.21.0 beta available for testing

The next release of ThinLinc is almost ready. Before the official launch of version 4.21.0, we’re making a beta build available for public testing. This beta includes over 100 fixes and improvements. Some of the most prominent changes are:

  • ThinLinc Web Access now supports the OpenID Connect authentication
    protocol. This enables organizations to delegate authentication to
    solutions like Keycloak or Microsoft Entra ID, allowing convenient
    single sign-on, and more flexibility in authentication methods and
    policy.

  • ThinLinc session logs are now in the system journal instead of in
    xinit.log in the ThinLinc session directories. This avoids multiple
    log locations for modern Linux systems, and gives more flexibility
    when analyzing logs.

  • It is now possible to configure the ThinLinc client with mandatory
    settings on managed endpoint devices. These settings will be forced
    and cannot be overridden by the user.

  • The Linux ThinLinc client now supports 64-bit ARM (ARM64),
    replacing the previous 32-bit ARM client. This improves
    compatibility with modern ARM hardware and operating systems.

  • The platform requirements for the ThinLinc client on macOS have
    been raised. It now requires macOS Ventura (version 13) or newer.
    Users on older versions of macOS will need to upgrade their
    operating system to use this version of the ThinLinc client.

You can find the download links and full release notes here: ThinLinc Beta Release | ThinLinc by Cendio

As always, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version and not recommended for critical production environments.

Let us know what you think in the comments below. If you run into any hiccups or unexpected behavior, please report it!

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The development team has really outdone themselves on this one. I highly recommend giving the full release notes a read, it’s packed with highly requested tweaks and features: https://www.cendio.com/downloads/beta/release-notes-4.21.0.txt

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Is there any update on when we will get accelerated 3D support directly from TigerVNC rather than going through VirtualGL? It has been nearly two years now since it was suggested that this would be an upcoming feature. This would be the biggest quality of life improvement for our users by quite some margin.

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It’s 90% there, just the other 90% left to go :wink:

The feature is actually there in upstream TigerVNC, but the main issue is that it doesn’t work with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, for reasons which are somewhat beyond our control. Given NVIDIA’s market share, we figured that this would be too much of a “caveat” to warrant including the feature in ThinLinc at this stage. Hope that clarifies things.

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Last time I looked, this was due to a lack of support in the NVIDIA drivers for DRI3. That is no longer the case, so er, what is the holdup? The TL;DR is that Wayland basically forced NVIDIA’s hand.

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I’m a bit short on details, but here’s the upstream issue:

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These discuss the lack of DRI3 in the proprietary NVIDIA driver and are from posts well over a year old. As I said DRI3 v1.2 is now INCLUDED in the proprietary NVIDIA driver. I posted a link for you to know I was not making things up. It would appear Cendio is working with out of date information and consequently unnecessarily holding back the transparently accelerated OpenGL feature.