What works, what is rough, and who is building this
Heavendesk is beta software. It works well on the hardware we own and we are honest about the rest, because the alternative is you finding out on your own machine. Here is where things actually stand.
Working well
solidNVIDIA graphics
The screen is captured and encoded on the GPU itself, so the machine sharing barely notices. This is the setup we develop against every day and the one we trust most.
AMD graphics
Tested on Linux with a current Radeon card on the standard amdgpu driver and with an older low-power Radeon, both encoding in hardware. On Windows the AMD encoder is included, but we have not run it on an AMD card yet, so if you have one we would love to hear how it goes.
KDE Plasma on Wayland
What Heavendesk is built for. Your real desktop, your monitors, your cursor shapes and your sound, not a stripped down remote session. Other desktops should work too, and there is an X11 path for machines whose graphics the Wayland capture cannot use. Other desktops are largely untried rather than known broken.
Windows
Windows works both as the computer you connect from and the one you connect to, the lock screen and the sign-in screen included. We test it on Intel graphics and on an NVIDIA RTX card, where hardware encoding and decoding both run.
Arch, Fedora and Ubuntu
Signed packages for Arch and its derivatives, Fedora 44, and Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04 along with the distributions built on them such as KDE neon, Kubuntu and Mint. One command installs and one command removes.
Reachable from the login screen
Sharing runs as a system service, so a machine is reachable from the moment it boots. You do not have to be logged in first, or leave a session open behind you.
Several monitors
Each monitor is sent as its own stream, so every screen arrives at its full resolution instead of all of them being squeezed into one picture. Monitors can be plugged in and unplugged during a session. This works on Linux and on Windows; you can also pick a single monitor and send only that.
Working, with rough edges
known issuesIntel graphics can stutter
On some Intel laptops the video conversion occasionally fails and the picture freezes or flickers for a moment while it recovers. It does recover on its own and the session keeps going. We know it happens, we have not yet found what triggers it, and a report with your exact chip helps more than you would think.
Older NVIDIA cards on the open driver
Cards too old for NVIDIA's current driver fall back to the open nouveau driver. The picture is correct, but the conversion and encoding both happen on the processor, so it costs a core or more and will not stay smooth at high resolutions and frame rates. Lower the frame rate or the resolution and it becomes usable.
Not available yet
not yetmacOS
There is no macOS build yet, and no date for one.
Who is building this
A very small team, with very little hardware
Heavendesk is built by a tiny team. We test on the handful of machines we happen to own, which means whole categories of hardware, drivers and desktop setups never get tried before a release goes out. That is the honest limit of what we can promise, and it is why the list above is written the way it is instead of claiming everything works.
Your feedback genuinely changes what we build
If something is broken, slow, or just strange on your machine, please tell us. A short note about your graphics card, your distribution and what you saw is enough, and it is often the only way a problem on hardware we do not own ever reaches us. Bug reports are not a nuisance here, they are most of how this gets better.