There absolutely is a way. Just ssh over to it using the X option and run kstars with it opening a window on your desktop. Like this

ssh -l astroberry -X 192.168.247.108

kstars &

This requires that you are running Linux on your desktop though (or something with X11). It also means that you need to keep your desktop running and connected to the pi.

No you misunderstand me...
I know it can be done and how to do it, my point is that running 4k over VNC is awful and really laggy, that’s what I want to avoid, normal HD is fine, but 4k resolution is a no go....over VNC..

I do get your point. Remote X11 is not VNC. It's quite different. It does it's drawing using your desktop hardware. It's not just copying the screen data from the pi to your desktop. I haven't tried kstars much doing it this way, but I expect it to perform way better than VNC. I'd expect it to handle 4k resolution well. I'll try it again tonight. The part that I'm concerned with is the connection. If I loose my wifi for a long period, the X11 remote app will be useless. The VNC app on the other hand will be just fine.

I just tried it. The planetarium part of kstars is slow as lots of the pixels are being pushed across the wire, but the UI is actually nice and fairly snappy. Not quite as good as native on the desktop, but much better than VNC even at 1920. The windows come up natively on the desktop and can be resized large and still it's very snappy. I've got a great big monitor too, 4K os something like that. So give it a try! I think that I'll stick with VNC since it can handle a loss of network connectivity with no issues. The 1920 display is a bit annoying, but not that bad.

Jamie

Here's a little more:

ssh -l pi -C -X 192.168.247.108

This adds the "-C" for compression which helps with some things. I also had to use the "pi" account for some reason, probably to do with all my mucking around.

photos.app.goo.gl/ypFvet7RWjpv9KEq5

Jamie

Just a note that using the native X protocol over the network can sometimes have very poor performance if the connection starts to have higher latencies. This is because the protocol is very laggy and a lot of things have to wait until the screen redraws complete.

If you're having problems with VNC, has anyone tried xrdp ?

XRDP is slightly different, in that it doesn't actually mirror the native desktop, but uses the MS Windows RDP protocol to run a new remote session on the Pi, but it might work better - so if multiple people were to connect they would each have a different desktop, although that isn't probably a good use case here, it still works with a single user.

Yes, I have tried XRDP, and found it to be about the same as VNC, and still not good with 4k...

Hello,

Did you try NoMachine ?

Cheers

Yes, have tried them all, and none will produce a lag free connection with 4k....

I'd also recommend trying xpra. It's a more modern X11 forwarding like system.

I've got an update if anyone is trying this.

So the WIFI stopped again for not so well known reasons. I'm guessing that it happened after a software/firmware update. I had to tweak it again. This time it's a bit hacky, but it works.

Login as root and add this to your crontab:

crontab -e

@reboot /usr/bin/tvservice -o
@reboot /usr/bin/vcgencmd display_power 0

@reboot sleep 5; /usr/bin/tvservice -o
@reboot sleep 5; /usr/bin/vcgencmd display_power 0

@reboot sleep 60; /usr/bin/tvservice -o
@reboot sleep 60; /usr/bin/vcgencmd display_power 0

Seems that I've got to do that several times after boot. I couldn't just put it in /etc/rc.local

Ugly, but it works!