When a remote-only machine is stuck at the greetd TUI, run the Nushell helper from an SSH session to start one complete PAM/logind Wayland session without changing the persistent NixOS configuration:

sudo nu ./remote-session.nu

The helper validates its dependencies before changing the current session. It then stops the normal greetd service, starts a transient systemd-managed greetd configuration on /dev/tty1, and runs Niri directly. It returns after greetd, Niri, and Sunshine are ready. Tailscale is not affected.

The Virtual-1 output is created persistently by the vkms configuration in hosts/idols-ai/hardware-intel.nix and configured by hosts/idols-ai/niri-hardware.kdl. It gives Niri and Sunshine a capture target when both physical monitors attached to the NVIDIA GPU are off. The output also exists during normal physical sessions; keeping an idle virtual framebuffer has minor GPU and memory overhead.

Options:

-u USER       session user (defaults to SUDO_USER)
-t TTY        tty device, for example /dev/tty2
-c COMMAND    Wayland session command (defaults to niri --session)
-f, --force   replace an existing Niri session without confirmation
--check       validate prerequisites without changing service state

A reboot or a manual restart of greetd.service restores the normal TUI configuration.