Remote access is now baked into the Raspberry Pi
A short and sweet Raspberry Pi piece for you this morning: It’s now easier than ever to access your device remotely thanks to a newly unveiled access tool.
The new Raspberry Pi Connect service, which is primarily accessible via a web browser, is available annually official blog postcurrently in beta, and included in Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm due to the operating system’s move to the Wayland architecture, which makes the X protocol unavailable.
The less intuitive methods of remote access that still exist, such as VNC and SSH, are now arguably obsolete for end users who want to make the remote access process as simple as possible: according to the company’s own words, Raspberry Pi Connect is built with the corporate philosophy of ‘the just works’ in my mind.
Raspberry Pi Connect
Mind you, because Connect is still in beta, you may still need to run the usual apt commands in the terminal to install the service. Official documentation also states that Connect is not compatible with the Lite variant of Raspberry Pi OS.
It’s also the case that Raspberry Pis need to be linked to Raspberry Pi IDs for Connect to function – which might be a step too far for power users. It’s usually the case that anything that “just works” these days involves a certain capitulation to this kind of corporate opacity, but a Linux novice might be able to pass this up.
Just like everyone else external desktop software, the big offering of Raspberry Pi Connect is screen sharing, but there are also little quality of life things like copying and pasting between local and remote clipboards. Device and screen sharing permissions can also be managed via a web interface.
Notable limitations for now include running only one primary display, not supporting on-screen keyboards, requiring a browser that implements this ECMAScript 2020 to work, and some key combinations that are intercepted by browsers that require selection from a toolbar.