Thin client virtual machines for AI agents (Debian Forky)
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Thin client virtual machines for AI agents (Debian Forky)

Marius C
By Marius C
4 min read
💡
Note: if you are pro cancel culture, close the tab. The following article uses technology as-is to get results. Ruby on Rails / Hyprland / Omarchy Linux is bits and bytes only. Bits don't care about your opinion.

OpenAI makes a big fuzz about AI safety. Meanwhile, they cannot even deploy their Sandbox for codex on Windows.

mc_hamburg (@[email protected])
OpenAI codex Sandbox is broken on Windows. Yes, you read that right. On Windows, where it is needed the most. Reported: August 14 Reaction: none https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/38039#issu…

Since August. I have deployed a fix on my setup. It's not difficult. Safety first, only on osroadwarrior.info. 😺

Virtualize, don't sandbox AI

So I started building a low-footprint Linux, thin-client style.

Requirements:

  1. RDP (bitmap differential protocol, not h265 because I cannot attach a GPU to every VM guest on Proxmox or other hypervisor systems)
    1. compatible to RoyalTS (macOS and Windows)
  2. minimal desktop:
    1. low memory (max 900 MB for Desktop UI incl. services)
    2. low CPU (max 2-3% idle, 8-12% while busy)
    3. no laptop dependencies (no professional use cases for Linux on a laptop in 2026).
      Means no bluetooth daemon, Avahi or display brightness widget in a remote VM. Simple. Minimal.
    4. no bloat (we do not use random tools like Snap or Flatpak)
  3. Useful terminals
    1. no GPU terminals
    2. Terminator, Xfce Terminal
  4. Chromium, maybe Firefox with MCP AI automation
  5. AI agents

Not difficult to build. But... necessary.

Linux Mint and Wayland

Monthly News – June 2026 – The Linux Mint Blog
The Linux Mint BlogClem

Rumor is that Linux Mint will release end of 2026, featuring Wayland. Sadly they chose to go for LXDE, which is not what I want to use going forwards.

My main thin-client setup 2025-2026 was Linux Mint, Xorg and Xrdp. The problem is: Xrdp doesn't work with Wayland.

Linux Mint has the advantage that they use low-footprint desktop tools. But LXDE? No.

Hypr-RDP

Someone wrote hypr-rdp, which ports IronRDP to Hyprland. That is a very good start. IronRDP is a rock solid Rust-based RDP server for Linux, which supports different protocols. Among them: ClearCodec.

RDP is distinct from VNC in many regards:

  • it's a family of protocols, on Windows even with GDI specific channels
  • it can use h264 (which is not very useful for text)
    • needs a GPU or occupies more CPU than it should
  • traditionally RDP has a bitmap compression protocol, which is ideal for terminal and text (websites included)

So I patched hypr-rdp to support ClearCodec, and added a couple of modifications to make it better:

  1. cursor and cursor-performance (hidden unless needed)
  2. limited it to 20Hz, 30 FPS (bandwidth efficiency)
  3. added window resizing (proportional to client change) logic

I optimized Hyprland's Mesa pipeline a little (LLVMpipe software ratserrize) and limited the threads. And voila: we are 90% there. Xrdp like.

GitHub - norandom/hyperland-forky-worker-vm: Debian Forky, stripped down, workload VM, RDP
Debian Forky, stripped down, workload VM, RDP. Contribute to norandom/hyperland-forky-worker-vm development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHubnorandom

I decided to make it deployable with PyInfra which is a little fancier and faster than Ansible in 2026.

Debian Forky and Hyprland

Debian Forky ships an up2date version of Hyprland. Hyperland sees a lot of development, because it's funded for the next 3 years.

Debian Forky will be released in 2027, and be supported for years as well.

It's a sane combination, but sadly some folks in the dev team have US Republican opinions. I don't care. Ruby on Rails (a key developer of Omarchy Linux developed it, which funds Hyprland) is used by the CCC website, Metasploit, and many Web dev projects. But there is a cancel culture movement out there. Be warned.

Hyprland has some distinct advantages over Awesome WM or ion3. For once, it's an actual compositor. And it supports fractional scaling.

I added:

  • custom layouts, golden ratio inspired (I did not have to rewrite the whole stack)
  • theme switcher buttons for Terminator (custom themes)
  • a keyboard layout switcher (and an xsetkbmap alias for the dinosaurs among us)
  • a menu with applications
  • a window list
  • and a hybrid mode, so that by default I am not forced to rely on keyboard-first tiling. The dynamic window positions are remembered. RDP re-connects with differently sized clients can auto-resize the windows proportionally. This works hand in hand with RDP.
  • extra buttons on the title bars of menus (Windows 3.11 inspired, with pinned-on-top and transparency switch)

And that's it. The little things in daily development activity.

VM settings = speed speed speed

I added performance improvements for heavy AI workloads. If you use claude or codex you can let them run in a /loop over night and optimize processes. Then reconnect via RDP in the morning and check the results.

Performance wise this should give you 10-15% extra over Debian defaults in the VM guest. I disabled some security stuff, which isn't needed. Check it out, all modular.

#debian #hyprland #genai

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