I’ve been using rustdesk for while, and it works very well for me. The news of it being somewhat opaque, and developed from China, makes me a bit nervous.
Is there a FOSS equivalent that won’t make me jump through hoops, and be easily installed by someone else remotely?
I would like to be able to have it run at startup in Linux and windows, have a fairly complete feature set, like file transfer, copy paste, etc.
Also it’d be great if it could be easily installed by someone else remotely. I do SMB support, usually onsite, which is why it’s not cost effective to pay for a Teamviewer or Anydesk license.
I’m taking a look through flathub, but recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
Before RustDesk I have used NoMachine but that’s completely proprietary (Luxembourg company, except for the old core protocol - NX 1).
Afair I am afraid that there isn’t an all-in-one foss desktop remote software as good as RustDesk currently.
Xpra.
You can self-host your own relay, what is there to worry about?
You are not running the software cause you do not trust the ppl running it? So you do host the software anyway? Just because it is OS and just because you can run it on your own hardware does not mean you can blindly trust it.
You can literally monitor where the data is being transmitted. There is no need to trust anyone. If it was sending data to anything that isn’t your relay server, you’d be able to easily prove it.
It could install software that transmits the data some time else. Basically something virus would do. The code can be hidden somewhere or loaded from somewhere with simple code.
Those are basic tactics used for years by malware. If just simply monitoring would be enough to protect against malware then we would have way less problems.
You should never run untrusted code or code by untrusted ppl.
This thread has a lot of reasons against rustdesk and also discusses some alternatives: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/21632052
Bad coding practices is not malware, that just means the devs are not experts. Also, these were fixed when pointed out by the users, which is the whole point of being open source. The only reasonable issue is the direct modification of the GDM config, which required the user to click a button.
What about the certificate installation on windows? Besides, I never claimed it’s malware, but it’s certainly software I wouldn’t trust.
When running older Rustdesk versions on wayland it would display a notification saying “Rustdesk doesn’t support Wayland yet”, containing a button labeled “Fix it”, which is the button you’re referring to. There’s no way for the user to know that clicking this button will edit their GDM config and disable Wayland.
If you’re comfortable with Rustdesk but wary of the developer, you could try HopToDesk, which is a fork of Rustdesk but the company is based in the US.
Based in the US makes it good?
https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/2778
Beware of hoptodesk, it’s even more sketchy.
No, but a “company” in China has far less autonomy from the government in China than one in the US. For some people, that can be stressful
Untrue. Although it’s more likely for china to (ab)use this, but legally the us is just as „bad“.
If you’re in the US, maybe?
I only suggested it as Rustdesk not so long ago had no self-hosted FOSS server, whereas HopToDesk did - it’s been a while since I’ve reviewed FOSS remote desktops so I probably should again.
