Please have a look at the warnings in the comments:
I was hesitant to open this post because I already know about rustdesk, but eventually I did to see the community’s opinion on it. I’m so glad that I did because this is terrible!
I think more people should hear about all of this
I always neglected it because of its name. I thought it’s something for rust…
I guess it’s just written in Rust.
I self-host my own rustdesk server and it’s awesome. It just works flawlessly.
I used this recently to help a friend with some tech stuff. The docker images were simple to bring up and within minutes we were connected. It freaked him out how easily I could get on and control his PC. I was impressed by the whole experience.
Free Software*
Wasn’t there some controversy about this that it wasn’t entirely open-source?
they have a pro server with more features that’s closed source and paid
But why do you need a server for such a program? Can’t it be P2P or with the server stuff running on the client machine?
The server is used for hole punching, to open up a P2P connection thorugh NATs and Firewalls. If it doesn’t work the server also relays the traffic between the clients.
Getting an end to end connection through todays internet is unfortunately not easy for an average user.
Theoretically, without the server, every time you want to connect to a peer you would have to figure out what’s their public IP address is, which can change. The server acts as a middleman between the peers so you dont have to do this manually, all peers only need to know the server’s IP address to connect to each other. The server is really only used for this initial linking up of peers, afterwards the connection is P2P (if possible, they fall back to a relay server if P2P fails).
It’d be great if they implemented the same identity encryption/obfuscation that Signal uses but for the IPs.
Binary blobs i thought
Itsfoss is blogspam and often have many mistakes and wrong info. People should really stop posting links from them.
Itsfoss is indeed written by ChatGPT I think
It’s older than ChatGPT, but maybe this is true for their newer articles.
I also feel HowToGeek used to be great, now it’s just affiliations and misinformation. Shame.
Yeah it’s pretty awesome. My only gripe with it is the fact that it is super annoying when you want to send a client with your self-hosted urls to a customer.
You can either awkardly add it to the filename or you need to fork the client and build it yourself. Kind of sucks that the easier custom client function is stuck behind their subscription.
authentication is also stuck behind their subscription. for random customers to be able to use your servers, you also have to let everyone else on the internet use it.
Pretty sure you can configure it with a key so only authorized clients can use it
nope
I’ve been using MeshCentral lately, it does the job but the UI leaves something to be desired.
Have you tried changing the default view from Columns to List? IMO it makes the UI much better. Then you can add in a more details about each PC on the main view. Make is very useful if you have a lot of computers you are managing.
You can also switch from the left bar interface to top bar interface. That looks better to me. Also dark mode.
I have changed up the view and don’t get me wrong, it’s more than usable it’s just not pretty.
And sadly MeshCentral is pretty much death development wise, isn’t it? The main dev left Intel and now has not enough time for the project, wasn’t that the story?
Edit: it seems to be developed again, much slower,though. But better than nothing.
Oh I didn’t realise it was no longer actively being developed. That’s a bummer.
I must actually revoke my statement,it seems like it is now being revived and is developed again, at a much slower pace,though.
But much better than nothing and at least security updates seem to be working.
Sorry for the misinformation, my bad, the different sources are quite misleading sometimes.
I tried it and it’s works exactly like Anydesk, except it’s 5 times slower than Anydesk at least that’s on their server, I know I can host it myself but I don’t think I have the skill to set it up
It works very well and there is no speed difference at all. Of course you wont ever get anything worth in life without either putting in the work or paying either with money or your privacy.
ITT: It’s sketchy and will possibly mess with your Wayland set up.
Yeah I had my eye on this a few months back when I was looking for a FOSS windows Remote Desktop alternative. Between the security issues, and generally struggle to get it working well, I eventually went to a sunshine/moonlight combo for shockingly high performance screen sharing that can even handle basic gaming if need be.
I spent like 20 minutes self hosting and running over tailscale so traffic is always private… Never had an issue. I’ve got over 20 devices accessible on it.
Easy to remote register over ssh just by sending the installer plus running with server name plus key, then setting a static password.
I still think gaming wide moonlight is great though. You won’t really regret that.
Yeah, I was running it through Tailscale too. I’m definitely closer to a newbie than I am a self hosting vet, so there’s likely some fault of mine that made things not run so well.
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Rustdesk looks good on the outside, but if you look inside, it has a really bad codebase and has done some sketchy stuff in the past.
Last year, it installed custom root certificates as trusted on windows, which is a huge security risk: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/6444
On linux systems, it forced its own autostart with no option to disable this behavior: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/4863
In the past, when it didn’t have Wayland support yet, it edited your GDM config and just disabled wayland: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/1.1.9/src/platform/linux.rs#L411-L422
Furthermore, the code quality is really bad. 90% of the linux platform-dependant code is just executing shell commands and parsing their output, while the same could be achieved in a safe way with proper rust builtins: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/master/src/platform/linux.rs
While I agree that Rustdesk works pretty flawlessly, the codebase and the behavior of the developers made me distrust the software and I don’t recommend using it.
Wow that’s so sketchy.
Okayyyy… thats not great. I just read one of the threads and thats scary.
The person(s?) maintaining this seems to be VERY BAD at communicating. They did fix the auto start problem but did not at all discuss this from what I see. Thats not great.
Really sad about this, because Rust Desk has been the absolute best remote access tool I’ve ever used in the IT world, and that includes many different professional tools like Ninja& Teamviewer.
It’s so clean, easy to install and run, fast and low latency, handles multi-monitors great, runs on mobile, Linux, Windows, etc.
Such a shame that it is mired in controversy.
Wth is that, that is the most anti-idiomatic code I have ever seen
https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/master/src%2Fplatform%2Flinux.rs#L176
pub fn get_cursor() -> ResultType<Option<u64>> { let mut res = None; DISPLAY.with(|conn| { if let Ok(d) = conn.try_borrow_mut() { if !d.is_null() { unsafe { let img = XFixesGetCursorImage(*d); if !img.is_null() { res = Some((*img).cursor_serial as u64); XFree(img as _); } } } } }); Ok(res) }
I’m not an expert but this seems wrong.
Yep, I’m not a Rust expert either, but this is pretty cursed. The comments on this post have some more examples of bad rustdesk code: https://lobste.rs/s/njfvjb/rustdesk_with_tailscale_on_arch_linux
@petsoi@discuss.tchncs.de you might want to add that warning to the post.
They also tried to submit the app to Flathub, but had way too broad permissions with no explanation why. “Users expect filesystem access” etc. In the end it was rejected and they publish a .flatpak file themselves.
https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/5233
The other points are far worse though.
Rustdesk controversy
The whole discussion on that pull request is extremely sketchy, IMO.
To add on:
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There is no transparency about who is behind it. It just a Github account called “Rustdesk.” It could be a real company in Singapore or it could be some guy in China as people have speculated.
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The Rustdesk software needs way more permissions than necessary. This became evident with the flatpak as they did sandbox escapes which prevented them from being on flathub
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The Rustdesk distribution is entirely centralize release server run by Rustdesk. They could easily push out malware to lots of devices.
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They have done some sketchy things in the past. One of the things they did was quietly switch Linux desktops back to X11.
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The Rustdesk system is not terribly resistant to brute forcing. The weak password means they someone could try every combination.
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Rustdesk docker deployment docker compose exposes all ports on the host. This is minor but it could lead to a sandbox excape.
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Rustdesk servers keep getting hosted in countries that have freedom problems such as China and Russia.
Wow, I’m wondering how anyone would trust this software. It literally exposes your desktop. To me that requires top-tier trust level, i.e. nothing sketchy at all.
We need an alternative
Mesh central works well.
Not for all cases. It doesn’t allow for two way connections and privacy controls
could be some guy in China
I don’t see how that’s a problem, it’s not like it’s by a Chinese run company or like the Chinese government is spying on you; in the case you described it’d just be a rando with a hobby/vision.
The fact that it keeps getting hosted in countries that have freedom problems, such as China and Russia, does concern me, though.
The problem is that China makes developing privacy and freedom friendly tech illegal. You won’t find many Tor devs in China
How do they make that illegal?
I can’t find much on tech impeding laws online, whatever search terms I enter related to China and privacy just leads me to articles about their data protection law.
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