10 ms·

RustDesk – Open-source TeamViewer alternative

218 points by swah 4y ago

BitPirate 4y ago
Controlling a wayland client on Linux is still work in progress: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/56 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/56 Partial support has already been added: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/pull/932 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/pull/932
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Isn't everything Wayland related an everlasting work in progress? Especially thanks to Nvidia not playing ball. I wish I could switch to Wayland but the amount of gotchas is so huge that if I want every app to work as expected then X11 is still the only way to go.
  - tendstofortytwo 4y ago
    It doesn't seem so bad right now if you use Sway/GNOME/KDE. I have Wayland enabled on my Intel+NVIDIA laptop and it's been pretty much fine after installing the proprietary drivers.
  - jnsaff2 4y ago
    IDK, I've been on Wayland (via Sway) for about 5 years now, there were a few annoyances in the first few years but now I can't remember when was the last Wayland related thing that I needed to fix.
    - nicce 4y ago
      Screen sharing is a bit challenging but possible. It is not too long when it was impossible. I have personally a bug when sway does not return from sleep mode, sometimes randomly, and I have to physically power off the pc. It just shows black screen with backlight on. I guess the issue is on AMD drivers, but it is likely that it will never be fixed. I have no idea how driver bug can cause this on Wayland but not be an issue elsewhere.
    - larschdk 4y ago
      So, you didn't notice that video playback in Firefox isn't hardware accelerated and stutters a lot? (Firefox' sandbox prevents itself from creating the OpenGL context needed for hardware accelerated video playback).
      - nicce 4y ago
        Two years ago, the support was added? https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedora-finally-gets-va-api-on-wayland/ https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedor... Also, enabled by default with Mesa in these days https://linuxstoney.com/firefox-has-hardware-video-acceleration-enabled-by-default-for-linux-systems-with-mesa/ https://linuxstoney.com/firefox-has-hardware-video-accelerat...
        stoplying1 4y ago
        This entire subthread is exactly why I don't believe people when they trout out old linux desktop stereotypes and then handwave and imply they've actually tried it anytime recently. Shocking, in development efforts can undergo lots of change in the span of months, let alone years. Wayland is a wip (a number of things are being worked on right now that have never even been fathomed for x11) and it's already a significantly better experience in countless ways over x11.
    - beebeepka 4y ago
      What hardware, though? Do you have a dGPU, play games, etc. We know it works for "desktop" use
      - jnsaff2 4y ago
        I've had it on a few generations of nuc's and an XPS 9590 (where I disabled the nvidia card). I use it for DevOps mostly. So no gaming, don't have time for that anyway.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    Amusingly it is thanks to Wayland i can use Linux on my GPD Win 1 handheld[0] - apparently there is a bug in the video driver that when changing video modes can cause the entire screen to shift several lines (probably some memory offset issue, sometimes it even causes colors to go haywire) that needs a reboot to fix. However since Wayland (or at last KDE's Wayland implementation) doesn't provide any functionality for changing video modes, the bug isn't triggered when running KDE with Wayland as the latter forces games to use whatever video mode the desktop uses. Of course that means that games that do not support 1280x720 wont work at all, but that's minor details, about as important as using a lower resolution to get better framerates from the Atom iGPU the device has :-P (ok, actually might be possible by using gamescope[1], which runs its own Wayland+XWayland compositor inside an SDL window that you can also force to use a specific resolution - again no resolution changes are supported and that uses wlroots - that can be scaled to arbitrary outputs and if the SDL you're using has a Wayland backend to avoid going through the desktop's Wayland compositor's XWayland layer then you may not get that much lag at all - though not sure if there'd be enough memory left for the game after all that :-P) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPD_Win https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPD_Win [1] https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope
    - vetinari 4y ago
      > Of course that means that games that do not support 1280x720 wont work at all, On capable hardware (which your's probably isn't, not sure of Intel HD 405 capabilities), it is not a problem. The compositor can allocate a surface that corresponds to a given resolution (higher or lower than physical one, doesn't matter), the application renders its output at its preferred resolution and then compositor scales that buffer (using the output encoder's scaler, not GPU!) to physical output, effectively emulating that resolution. Well, at least Mutter is capable of doing this, not sure of wlroots.
  - ledgerdev 4y ago
    I have a laptop with nvidia card and wayland runs fine on the laptop screen, but lots of problems with docks and external monitors.
    - nicce 4y ago
      Wayland should be superior on external monitors when compared to Xorg, what kind of issues?
      - ledgerdev 4y ago
        This was on fedora 36... mostly screen will not wake from sleep, but also black lines on the screen, and complete signal mess up where I can barely see what's happening. I tried everything, like switched from hdmi to display port cables, installed latest drivers from nvidia, still it's a mess. Wasted countless hours jerking around with it. It was so unusable and gave up even trying any more a couple months ago. Maybe will try in a few more months because I would really like to use the machine with an external monitor. I have learned my lesson, and will NEVER buy another nvidia product, not worth the trouble.
        nicce 4y ago
        It sounds like a driver issue and hard to say what is wrong... FYI: Nvidia published open-source GPU Kernel modules couple months ago. Maybe there is a brighter future ahead. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc...
        ledgerdev 4y ago
        Looked around and seems pretty widespread. Links below to many issues, and some now fixed partially. Yeah, let's hope the open sourcing of those drivers make for a brighter future, but still I will do my damned best to never buy an nvidia product again. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/161 https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/161 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2166 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2166 https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/vgqyv2/wayland_nvidia_not_detecting_external_monitor/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/vgqyv2/wayland_nvidia_... https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1891 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1891 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/external-monitor-doesnt-work-on-wayland/214090 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/external-monitor-doesn...
  - revolvingocelot 4y ago
    Sheesh, yeah. Wayland is one of those aspirational things I check in with every once in a while, like Star Citizen or fusion power or the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice. They're nice things to think about, in dark moments, but I don't think one should bet on their successful implementation. ...right?!
    - stoplying1 4y ago
      Do you actually checkin on it or do you just go off the armchair comments from other folks that clearly haven't tried it anytime recently? Hardware acceleration (webgpu, vaapi, etc in Firefox), support for embedded platforms, mixed mode DPI, 360Hz screen support, fractional (albeit suboptimal for now but perfectly fine) scaling (miss me with complaints about proprietary electron clients), vulkan support, and soon there will be considerably better scrolling support than in x11, maybe even full top-bottom support for fractional scaling the list just goes on and on. But yeah, if you want to use scale some ancient out of date Electron app, you might have to use Xwayland it might look bad under some compositors. Not really the end of the world. You can even easily use OBS to screen share to those apps these days.
fareesh 4y ago
I use XVNC / Remmina and the default RDP thing on macOS as a client when I'm remotely tinkering with my own machines. Is there something better that works for other folks?
- swah 4y ago
  Is the initial connection as easy as TeamViewer - ie share a code with ther other person? I feel like that's the main thing when talking about "TeamViewer alternative": not needing to setup external access / port forwarding on your router.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  Mesh Central is the other decent open source offering I know of.
- Demonsult 4y ago
  NoMachine uses hardware h264 encoding. I can watch youtube remotely and barely notice the difference. It's commercial software with free personal use.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    an open source thing like nomachine would be wonderous.
dainiusse 4y ago
Tried it with my mom. With no negativity as I know it is not easy to make. But it would freeze after 15s of shared session time
- swah 4y ago
  I did a session with my colleague now: MacOS client, Ubuntu server. Got a couple disconnects too - but felt like they are very close to having an awesome product.
jupp0r 4y ago
“You have full control of your data, with no concerns about security” This makes me a little worried about non-memory management security bugs. Rust is definitely helpful in eliminating one major category of bugs, but the belief that this is sufficient for users to not have to worry about security is misguided.
- lagrange77 4y ago
  Ok fair point, but if run it additionally on a Mac, you should be completely safe.
  - etskinner 4y ago
    What does running it on Mac have to do with avoiding non-memory-safety bugs?
    - hkwerf 4y ago
      That may have been sarcasm.
      - lagrange77 4y ago
        It was. There has been a time, when many people thought Macs were inherently safe systems, just because there was way less malware for it, than for windows.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- moldavi 4y ago
  In fact, in the pursuit of eliminating memory-safety and security bugs, Rust can sometimes makes some privacy bugs more likely. For example, in GC'd/RC'd languages, if we have several UserAccount instances and a bunch of long-running operations on them, any particular long-running operation will just hold a reference to the UserAccount itself and modify it at will without any confusion. In Rust, the borrow checker often doesn't let us hold a reference from a long-running operation in practice, so we work around it by putting all UserAccount instances into a Vec<UserAccount>, and have our long-running operations refer to it via an index. However, we might erase and re-use a spot in that Vec, meaning the index now refers to some other UserAccount. If the operation uses that "dangling index", it can lead to leaking sensitive data to the wrong users, or data loss. When using Rust, one has to use discipline to avoid this bug: use IDs into a hash map, or generational indices, or Rc<RefCell<T>>. Each has its own performance hit, but that hit can be worth it to prevent privacy bugs. In the GC'd/RC'd language, this would still be a bug, but it wouldn't cause any mixups between different users' data. I'm not saying we should always use GC'd or RC'd languages for privacy-sensitive purposes, but one should be aware of the particular shortcomings of their tools and have proper practices and oversight in place to mitigate them.
adadtttt 4y ago
Does it support hardware accelerated video encoding like parsec? Looking for an alternative that performs similarly.
- BitPirate 4y ago
  https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/589 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/589
- sascha_sl 4y ago
  If your host has an NVIDIA GPU, Moonlight arguably performs better than Parsec on stable networks.
aantix 4y ago
Is it common in the Rust community to include the name of the language as part of the application name? Reminds me of the early 2000's - phpBB, etc.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  It's just a phase in the language adoption, I think. It's still novel to write projects in it (though less so every day) and people are still out there "marking their territory" in it. Python had a similar phase.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Pretty uncharitable and somewhat harsh indictment from you IMO. There's a class of programmers / power users out there who are looking for products with less probability of memory security problems bundled in (as is the case by default with most C programs, sadly) -- and I am one of them. I can't say I care about including the "Rust" word in the name of the product itself -- that's indeed a bit silly -- but I do insist on using Rust-written programs because as far as I am aware, the few servers I manage and monitor never once had a Rust program crash unexpectedly. These servers are ~19 months old at this point. And as a guy periodically working with Rust as well, I am aware of its promises and guarantees and I have personally ascertained they are not imaginary and they do indeed work well. And I'll keep seeking out and using Rust-written software going forward as well. (EDIT: It's fine to disagree but I can't argue with anonymous silent disagreements. Could you voice what you dislike about this comment, please?)
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      Sure, fine, if that works for you, that's all good. FWIW I also make a living working in Rust right now. I still see broadly that most users don't care, nor should they. Quality speaks for itself. If Rust helps with that, that's fine, but in the long run it's overly techy branding. Of course this is an open source thing, so really geared to nerds, so there's that.
ComodoHacker 4y ago
> The open source TeamViewer alternative. Display and control your PC and Android devices from anywhere at anytime. That's not what TeamViewer, AnyDesk and others offer. They offer display and control of anyone's PC, without a tech-savvy person on that end. There's no way any open-source project could compete in this space.
- etskinner 4y ago
  What would stop someone from setting up a server that listens for connections? Kind of like a reverse VNC (or, by extension, reverse ssh tunneling). It may not be a feature of the program yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. I could compile and distribute my own binary that automatically connects to me.example.com:1234, make sure that server is accessible from the internet, tell the user to bypass non-signed executable restrictions, and we're good to go.
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    Yea this is likely what we’re gonna see in scams in the coming months, years, go to helpmenow.com download/install look at that you’re scammed.
    - Technetium 4y ago
      This has been happening for very many years now. It is very common for a shady scam company to buy an enterprise license for remote access software preconfigured to allow unattended access via predefined variables. This is something very very useful in actual enterprise scenarios where you want to deploy remote access software, but equally dangerous in the wrong hands. The only thing you can do to stop it is educate end users.
- belthesar 4y ago
  RustDesk does have a quick connect style runner like TeamViewer that works just the same. It wasn't super performant, and on Windows it did not gracefully handle UAC prompts, so it definitely has some rough edges, but it functions much like its closed source predecessors did early on in its life.
proto_lambda 4y ago
Quoting from the last time this was posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31456007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31456007): I'd proceed with caution. Apparently it doesn't support Wayland, so when you run it under Wayland it offers you a "Fix it!" button that, when clicked, runs sed on some gdm system config files to revert it to X11 (nevermind that gdm is far from the only way to use Wayland): https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/1.1.9/src/platform/linux.rs#L411-L422 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/1.1.9/src/platform.... If this is the kind of thing that's considered acceptable by the developer, I'd rather keep their products far away from my machines. A quick glance at the code also reveals an almost complete lack of comments and copious use of unexplained `unsafe`.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Fnoord 4y ago
  Came here to comment on Wayland (I don't use Gnome or a display manager but Sway fired up from CLI). I guess I will keep using wayvnc over Wireguard.
chungy 4y ago
As someone that's never used TeamViewer, is that a more complete description than simply being a "TeamViewer alternative"? Skimming through the readme, I don't know what this gains over VNC and RDP solutions. Seems to be the same thing, but a different protocol?
- imiric 4y ago
  With VNC and RDP you have to mess with IP addresses, network configuration, quality/bandwidth settings, etc., which is a tall hurdle for general remote tech support. With TV, the other person simply shares a code, and the connection is much more stable.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  you can use their web version if you are in a pinch and have rusdesk client running at your home/office machine. since you know the password, you can get access quickly... this is like vnc but better. RDP is another beast altogether. i use rustdesk and RDP on a daily basis and they are for different things.
- actuallyalys 4y ago
  I guess "remote support tool" would be the generic term. VNC and RDP are broader tools for controlling another computer and aren't specifically geared toward situations where someone without much experience wants to give the person supporting them control. (You could build a tool like that on top of them, probably.)
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
as someone who has started to daily drive rustdesk for 12 hours a day 6 days a week on 1 to 5/9 computers daily, this is a much better experience visually than anydesk. i've stopped using teamviewer 3-5 years ago when they said i had violated home free edition. anydesk seemed to go that way last year or so and i jumped ship. from my linux to windows 10 ltsc, alt-tab has issues, anydesk does not. anydesk has this fucking numlock bug for years now which hasnt been fixed. rustdesk does not have that. i am able to watch youtube over rustdesk, anydesk chugs. other than that, its just the same same. i highly encourage people to move from anydesk (again, teamviewer is out a long time ago anyways) and rustdesk is a good alternative. good luck to the team. edit: yes. file copy paste does not work from linux-windows, maybe it does windows-windows but i havent checked that while anydesk does this
- Technetium 4y ago
  I also daily drive Anydesk, and I use it a borderline obscene amount. I have gotten no warnings about hitting a usage limit. I moved to Anydesk for the same reason, and would probably move away if Anydesk put up a payment wall. Do you have any links about free-tier limitations? I use Windows/Linux to connect to Windows/Linux/Mac/Android and I have not yet hit any snags with numlock or device connection limits. The only bug / minor nitpick of Anydesk is that a Linux session host needs to explicitly initiate a new connection to the client for a file transfer, whereas on Windows hosts it happens transparently and just gives you a file picker alongside the existing session.
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    yeah, there is a soft-limit https://www.reddit.com/r/AnyDesk/comments/qiid2u/official_statement_professional_use_monitoring/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AnyDesk/comments/qiid2u/official_st... last time i checked, they were mentioning something like 80 hours in 8 weeks or something that averaged to around 1.5 hours a day or something.... i did not bother waiting to get "whitelisted" because rustdesk works just as well without all this professional/free nonsense
    - 4y ago
benbristow 4y ago
Not 100% open source, but a good solution for controlling my parent's laptop when they need a hand with something (they live in England, I live in Scotland) is to use ZeroTier to set up a VPN (installed it on their laptop when I had physical access to it, uses basically no system resources and just runs in the background automatically) and then use RDP built into Windows (I installed Windows 10 Enterprise on their laptop when I first set it up, have loads of MSDN keys from work). https://www.zerotier.com/ https://www.zerotier.com/ Works really, really well and doesn't try to wrongfully block me for 'commercial usage' like Teamviewer does.
- password4321 4y ago
  Bitvise SSH Server for Windows is also free for personal use, if you'd rather just forward the RDP port securely.
  - benbristow 4y ago
    Not sure about Bitvise SSH server, thanks for the recommendation though, is that Zerotier works behind firewalls. Don't need to do any port forwarding etc. Very similar to Logmein's Hamachi. Since their laptop is usually on WiFi behind an ISP-provided router/modem combo this is ideal. Also don't need to force a static IP on the network so the port forwarding rules align properly. As I say, we're in different countries so this is very handy, it "just works". Also is secure as nobody can jump onto the virtual network without explicit whitelisting on ZeroTier's Web UI. You have to login (with 2FA) and click a checkbox to allow access if anyone wants to join.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    RDP nowadays uses TLS.
    - password4321 4y ago
      True! My recommendation is influenced by 2019's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueKeep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueKeep Microsoft RDP remote code execution vulnerability.
IYasha 4y ago
Nah, when it comes to Linux, KRDC wins.
thebeardisred 4y ago
I'm a bit curious here. I see that RustDesk is licensed AGPL 3.0. At the same time the GUI component (Sciter - https://www.sciter.com https://www.sciter.com) is proprietary software with it's own non-compatible license (https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/blob/524a90ef7eab16575df9496f7e4c374bbd5fb1fe/license.htm https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/blob/524a90ef7eab16575...). Was the intention to use something like LGPL to stand on the shoulders of the external libraries or was the choice of AGPL just a hopeful goal with licensing issues to be resolved in the future?
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  It's a stated goal to replace sciter with Flutter.
legalcorrection 4y ago
For connecting between two Windows machines, I want to use the RDP protocol, but the built-in RDP client and server don't take care of the NAT/firewall traversal and such. Is there a software solution like TeamViewer or RustDesk that just does the leg work to set up the connection and then hands it off to the Windows built-in RDP libraries?
- easrng 4y ago
  Try the built in Quick Assist app? I think it does NAT traversal.
Technetium 4y ago
I *REALLY* want to love this, but it just honestly all-around doesn't work very well or reliably. The developer is almost impossible to communicate with. They don't have CI setup very well at all. It's also nearly impossible to selfhost. I'll be forced to keep using Anydesk until there's something that can at least match it in stability and features. There is potential for this to be good, but not without a LOT more change. Source for my experience is that I co-maintain this package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rustdesk https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rustdesk
kingrazor 4y ago
Another option if you don't mind running your own server is Mesh Central. It's open source as well. I've personally met the developer and he's a very knowledgeable and likeable person, if that means anything.
shimonabi 4y ago
I have tried self-hosting this with Docker a couple of weeks ago and it seems to work. You point the client to your server by including the address in the .exe filename on Windows. Be careful: encryption is not enabled by default.
- e12e 4y ago
  > Be careful: encryption is not enabled by default. Wait, what?
dang 4y ago
Rustdesk – Remote desktop software, an open source TeamViewer alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31456007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31456007 - May 2022 (102 comments)
rustdesk 4y ago
Thanks all of you. We did some stupid things before, especially the Wayland "Fix it" button, no excuse, we have removed it, and been working hard to make Wayland support work. https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/pull/932 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/pull/932 We are also removing Sciter, rewriting the UI with Flutter, https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/tree/flutter_desktop https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/tree/flutter_desktop. But Flutter does not support 32-bit Windows, we have to keep Sciter for 32-bit Windows version. As an open source project, we only have very limit bandwidth for you, the connection is not reliable sometime if you use our public servers. That's why we encourage the selfhost, and open source the server https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server. We are attempting to improve the bandwidth, https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/1026 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/1026. Here is a good video for selfhost which can help you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nzHm3xGz2I&t=1032s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nzHm3xGz2I&t=1032s We hope more contributors can join us to make it better. Here is our milestones: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/918 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/918 I do not know why @Technetium said "impossible to communicate", appologize if I made you not happy before. I just lost patience sometimes, it is really not an easy job to maintain an open source project like RustDesk. We communiated very well with RustDesk Server contributor, https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server/issues/36 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server/issues/36.

218 points by swah 4y ago

Controlling a wayland client on Linux is still work in progress: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/56 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/56 Partial support has already been added: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/pull/932 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/pull/932

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Isn't everything Wayland related an everlasting work in progress? Especially thanks to Nvidia not playing ball. I wish I could switch to Wayland but the amount of gotchas is so huge that if I want every app to work as expected then X11 is still the only way to go.
- tendstofortytwo 4y ago
  It doesn't seem so bad right now if you use Sway/GNOME/KDE. I have Wayland enabled on my Intel+NVIDIA laptop and it's been pretty much fine after installing the proprietary drivers.
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  IDK, I've been on Wayland (via Sway) for about 5 years now, there were a few annoyances in the first few years but now I can't remember when was the last Wayland related thing that I needed to fix.
  - nicce 4y ago
    Screen sharing is a bit challenging but possible. It is not too long when it was impossible. I have personally a bug when sway does not return from sleep mode, sometimes randomly, and I have to physically power off the pc. It just shows black screen with backlight on. I guess the issue is on AMD drivers, but it is likely that it will never be fixed. I have no idea how driver bug can cause this on Wayland but not be an issue elsewhere.
  - larschdk 4y ago
    So, you didn't notice that video playback in Firefox isn't hardware accelerated and stutters a lot? (Firefox' sandbox prevents itself from creating the OpenGL context needed for hardware accelerated video playback).
    - nicce 4y ago
      Two years ago, the support was added? https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedora-finally-gets-va-api-on-wayland/ https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedor... Also, enabled by default with Mesa in these days https://linuxstoney.com/firefox-has-hardware-video-acceleration-enabled-by-default-for-linux-systems-with-mesa/ https://linuxstoney.com/firefox-has-hardware-video-accelerat...
      - stoplying1 4y ago
        This entire subthread is exactly why I don't believe people when they trout out old linux desktop stereotypes and then handwave and imply they've actually tried it anytime recently. Shocking, in development efforts can undergo lots of change in the span of months, let alone years. Wayland is a wip (a number of things are being worked on right now that have never even been fathomed for x11) and it's already a significantly better experience in countless ways over x11.
  - beebeepka 4y ago
    What hardware, though? Do you have a dGPU, play games, etc. We know it works for "desktop" use
    - jnsaff2 4y ago
      I've had it on a few generations of nuc's and an XPS 9590 (where I disabled the nvidia card). I use it for DevOps mostly. So no gaming, don't have time for that anyway.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  Amusingly it is thanks to Wayland i can use Linux on my GPD Win 1 handheld[0] - apparently there is a bug in the video driver that when changing video modes can cause the entire screen to shift several lines (probably some memory offset issue, sometimes it even causes colors to go haywire) that needs a reboot to fix. However since Wayland (or at last KDE's Wayland implementation) doesn't provide any functionality for changing video modes, the bug isn't triggered when running KDE with Wayland as the latter forces games to use whatever video mode the desktop uses. Of course that means that games that do not support 1280x720 wont work at all, but that's minor details, about as important as using a lower resolution to get better framerates from the Atom iGPU the device has :-P (ok, actually might be possible by using gamescope[1], which runs its own Wayland+XWayland compositor inside an SDL window that you can also force to use a specific resolution - again no resolution changes are supported and that uses wlroots - that can be scaled to arbitrary outputs and if the SDL you're using has a Wayland backend to avoid going through the desktop's Wayland compositor's XWayland layer then you may not get that much lag at all - though not sure if there'd be enough memory left for the game after all that :-P) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPD_Win https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPD_Win [1] https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope
  - vetinari 4y ago
    > Of course that means that games that do not support 1280x720 wont work at all, On capable hardware (which your's probably isn't, not sure of Intel HD 405 capabilities), it is not a problem. The compositor can allocate a surface that corresponds to a given resolution (higher or lower than physical one, doesn't matter), the application renders its output at its preferred resolution and then compositor scales that buffer (using the output encoder's scaler, not GPU!) to physical output, effectively emulating that resolution. Well, at least Mutter is capable of doing this, not sure of wlroots.
- ledgerdev 4y ago
  I have a laptop with nvidia card and wayland runs fine on the laptop screen, but lots of problems with docks and external monitors.
  - nicce 4y ago
    Wayland should be superior on external monitors when compared to Xorg, what kind of issues?
    - ledgerdev 4y ago
      This was on fedora 36... mostly screen will not wake from sleep, but also black lines on the screen, and complete signal mess up where I can barely see what's happening. I tried everything, like switched from hdmi to display port cables, installed latest drivers from nvidia, still it's a mess. Wasted countless hours jerking around with it. It was so unusable and gave up even trying any more a couple months ago. Maybe will try in a few more months because I would really like to use the machine with an external monitor. I have learned my lesson, and will NEVER buy another nvidia product, not worth the trouble.
      - nicce 4y ago
        It sounds like a driver issue and hard to say what is wrong... FYI: Nvidia published open-source GPU Kernel modules couple months ago. Maybe there is a brighter future ahead. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc...
        ledgerdev 4y ago
        Looked around and seems pretty widespread. Links below to many issues, and some now fixed partially. Yeah, let's hope the open sourcing of those drivers make for a brighter future, but still I will do my damned best to never buy an nvidia product again. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/161 https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/161 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2166 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2166 https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/vgqyv2/wayland_nvidia_not_detecting_external_monitor/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/vgqyv2/wayland_nvidia_... https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1891 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1891 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/external-monitor-doesnt-work-on-wayland/214090 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/external-monitor-doesn...
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  Sheesh, yeah. Wayland is one of those aspirational things I check in with every once in a while, like Star Citizen or fusion power or the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice. They're nice things to think about, in dark moments, but I don't think one should bet on their successful implementation. ...right?!
  - stoplying1 4y ago
    Do you actually checkin on it or do you just go off the armchair comments from other folks that clearly haven't tried it anytime recently? Hardware acceleration (webgpu, vaapi, etc in Firefox), support for embedded platforms, mixed mode DPI, 360Hz screen support, fractional (albeit suboptimal for now but perfectly fine) scaling (miss me with complaints about proprietary electron clients), vulkan support, and soon there will be considerably better scrolling support than in x11, maybe even full top-bottom support for fractional scaling the list just goes on and on. But yeah, if you want to use scale some ancient out of date Electron app, you might have to use Xwayland it might look bad under some compositors. Not really the end of the world. You can even easily use OBS to screen share to those apps these days.

fareesh 4y ago

I use XVNC / Remmina and the default RDP thing on macOS as a client when I'm remotely tinkering with my own machines. Is there something better that works for other folks?

swah 4y ago
Is the initial connection as easy as TeamViewer - ie share a code with ther other person? I feel like that's the main thing when talking about "TeamViewer alternative": not needing to setup external access / port forwarding on your router.
xen2xen1 4y ago
Mesh Central is the other decent open source offering I know of.
Demonsult 4y ago
NoMachine uses hardware h264 encoding. I can watch youtube remotely and barely notice the difference. It's commercial software with free personal use.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  an open source thing like nomachine would be wonderous.

dainiusse 4y ago

Tried it with my mom. With no negativity as I know it is not easy to make. But it would freeze after 15s of shared session time

swah 4y ago
I did a session with my colleague now: MacOS client, Ubuntu server. Got a couple disconnects too - but felt like they are very close to having an awesome product.

jupp0r 4y ago

“You have full control of your data, with no concerns about security” This makes me a little worried about non-memory management security bugs. Rust is definitely helpful in eliminating one major category of bugs, but the belief that this is sufficient for users to not have to worry about security is misguided.

lagrange77 4y ago
Ok fair point, but if run it additionally on a Mac, you should be completely safe.
- etskinner 4y ago
  What does running it on Mac have to do with avoiding non-memory-safety bugs?
  - hkwerf 4y ago
    That may have been sarcasm.
    - lagrange77 4y ago
      It was. There has been a time, when many people thought Macs were inherently safe systems, just because there was way less malware for it, than for windows.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
moldavi 4y ago
In fact, in the pursuit of eliminating memory-safety and security bugs, Rust can sometimes makes some privacy bugs more likely. For example, in GC'd/RC'd languages, if we have several UserAccount instances and a bunch of long-running operations on them, any particular long-running operation will just hold a reference to the UserAccount itself and modify it at will without any confusion. In Rust, the borrow checker often doesn't let us hold a reference from a long-running operation in practice, so we work around it by putting all UserAccount instances into a Vec<UserAccount>, and have our long-running operations refer to it via an index. However, we might erase and re-use a spot in that Vec, meaning the index now refers to some other UserAccount. If the operation uses that "dangling index", it can lead to leaking sensitive data to the wrong users, or data loss. When using Rust, one has to use discipline to avoid this bug: use IDs into a hash map, or generational indices, or Rc<RefCell<T>>. Each has its own performance hit, but that hit can be worth it to prevent privacy bugs. In the GC'd/RC'd language, this would still be a bug, but it wouldn't cause any mixups between different users' data. I'm not saying we should always use GC'd or RC'd languages for privacy-sensitive purposes, but one should be aware of the particular shortcomings of their tools and have proper practices and oversight in place to mitigate them.

adadtttt 4y ago

Does it support hardware accelerated video encoding like parsec? Looking for an alternative that performs similarly.

BitPirate 4y ago
https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/589 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/589
sascha_sl 4y ago
If your host has an NVIDIA GPU, Moonlight arguably performs better than Parsec on stable networks.

aantix 4y ago

Is it common in the Rust community to include the name of the language as part of the application name? Reminds me of the early 2000's - phpBB, etc.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
It's just a phase in the language adoption, I think. It's still novel to write projects in it (though less so every day) and people are still out there "marking their territory" in it. Python had a similar phase.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Pretty uncharitable and somewhat harsh indictment from you IMO. There's a class of programmers / power users out there who are looking for products with less probability of memory security problems bundled in (as is the case by default with most C programs, sadly) -- and I am one of them. I can't say I care about including the "Rust" word in the name of the product itself -- that's indeed a bit silly -- but I do insist on using Rust-written programs because as far as I am aware, the few servers I manage and monitor never once had a Rust program crash unexpectedly. These servers are ~19 months old at this point. And as a guy periodically working with Rust as well, I am aware of its promises and guarantees and I have personally ascertained they are not imaginary and they do indeed work well. And I'll keep seeking out and using Rust-written software going forward as well. (EDIT: It's fine to disagree but I can't argue with anonymous silent disagreements. Could you voice what you dislike about this comment, please?)
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Sure, fine, if that works for you, that's all good. FWIW I also make a living working in Rust right now. I still see broadly that most users don't care, nor should they. Quality speaks for itself. If Rust helps with that, that's fine, but in the long run it's overly techy branding. Of course this is an open source thing, so really geared to nerds, so there's that.

ComodoHacker 4y ago

> The open source TeamViewer alternative. Display and control your PC and Android devices from anywhere at anytime. That's not what TeamViewer, AnyDesk and others offer. They offer display and control of anyone's PC, without a tech-savvy person on that end. There's no way any open-source project could compete in this space.

etskinner 4y ago
What would stop someone from setting up a server that listens for connections? Kind of like a reverse VNC (or, by extension, reverse ssh tunneling). It may not be a feature of the program yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. I could compile and distribute my own binary that automatically connects to me.example.com:1234, make sure that server is accessible from the internet, tell the user to bypass non-signed executable restrictions, and we're good to go.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  Yea this is likely what we’re gonna see in scams in the coming months, years, go to helpmenow.com download/install look at that you’re scammed.
  - Technetium 4y ago
    This has been happening for very many years now. It is very common for a shady scam company to buy an enterprise license for remote access software preconfigured to allow unattended access via predefined variables. This is something very very useful in actual enterprise scenarios where you want to deploy remote access software, but equally dangerous in the wrong hands. The only thing you can do to stop it is educate end users.
belthesar 4y ago
RustDesk does have a quick connect style runner like TeamViewer that works just the same. It wasn't super performant, and on Windows it did not gracefully handle UAC prompts, so it definitely has some rough edges, but it functions much like its closed source predecessors did early on in its life.

proto_lambda 4y ago

Quoting from the last time this was posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31456007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31456007): I'd proceed with caution. Apparently it doesn't support Wayland, so when you run it under Wayland it offers you a "Fix it!" button that, when clicked, runs sed on some gdm system config files to revert it to X11 (nevermind that gdm is far from the only way to use Wayland): https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/1.1.9/src/platform/linux.rs#L411-L422 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/1.1.9/src/platform.... If this is the kind of thing that's considered acceptable by the developer, I'd rather keep their products far away from my machines. A quick glance at the code also reveals an almost complete lack of comments and copious use of unexplained `unsafe`.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Fnoord 4y ago
Came here to comment on Wayland (I don't use Gnome or a display manager but Sway fired up from CLI). I guess I will keep using wayvnc over Wireguard.

chungy 4y ago

As someone that's never used TeamViewer, is that a more complete description than simply being a "TeamViewer alternative"? Skimming through the readme, I don't know what this gains over VNC and RDP solutions. Seems to be the same thing, but a different protocol?

imiric 4y ago
With VNC and RDP you have to mess with IP addresses, network configuration, quality/bandwidth settings, etc., which is a tall hurdle for general remote tech support. With TV, the other person simply shares a code, and the connection is much more stable.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
you can use their web version if you are in a pinch and have rusdesk client running at your home/office machine. since you know the password, you can get access quickly... this is like vnc but better. RDP is another beast altogether. i use rustdesk and RDP on a daily basis and they are for different things.
actuallyalys 4y ago
I guess "remote support tool" would be the generic term. VNC and RDP are broader tools for controlling another computer and aren't specifically geared toward situations where someone without much experience wants to give the person supporting them control. (You could build a tool like that on top of them, probably.)

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

as someone who has started to daily drive rustdesk for 12 hours a day 6 days a week on 1 to 5/9 computers daily, this is a much better experience visually than anydesk. i've stopped using teamviewer 3-5 years ago when they said i had violated home free edition. anydesk seemed to go that way last year or so and i jumped ship. from my linux to windows 10 ltsc, alt-tab has issues, anydesk does not. anydesk has this fucking numlock bug for years now which hasnt been fixed. rustdesk does not have that. i am able to watch youtube over rustdesk, anydesk chugs. other than that, its just the same same. i highly encourage people to move from anydesk (again, teamviewer is out a long time ago anyways) and rustdesk is a good alternative. good luck to the team. edit: yes. file copy paste does not work from linux-windows, maybe it does windows-windows but i havent checked that while anydesk does this

Technetium 4y ago
I also daily drive Anydesk, and I use it a borderline obscene amount. I have gotten no warnings about hitting a usage limit. I moved to Anydesk for the same reason, and would probably move away if Anydesk put up a payment wall. Do you have any links about free-tier limitations? I use Windows/Linux to connect to Windows/Linux/Mac/Android and I have not yet hit any snags with numlock or device connection limits. The only bug / minor nitpick of Anydesk is that a Linux session host needs to explicitly initiate a new connection to the client for a file transfer, whereas on Windows hosts it happens transparently and just gives you a file picker alongside the existing session.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  yeah, there is a soft-limit https://www.reddit.com/r/AnyDesk/comments/qiid2u/official_statement_professional_use_monitoring/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AnyDesk/comments/qiid2u/official_st... last time i checked, they were mentioning something like 80 hours in 8 weeks or something that averaged to around 1.5 hours a day or something.... i did not bother waiting to get "whitelisted" because rustdesk works just as well without all this professional/free nonsense
  - 4y ago

benbristow 4y ago

Not 100% open source, but a good solution for controlling my parent's laptop when they need a hand with something (they live in England, I live in Scotland) is to use ZeroTier to set up a VPN (installed it on their laptop when I had physical access to it, uses basically no system resources and just runs in the background automatically) and then use RDP built into Windows (I installed Windows 10 Enterprise on their laptop when I first set it up, have loads of MSDN keys from work). https://www.zerotier.com/ https://www.zerotier.com/ Works really, really well and doesn't try to wrongfully block me for 'commercial usage' like Teamviewer does.

password4321 4y ago
Bitvise SSH Server for Windows is also free for personal use, if you'd rather just forward the RDP port securely.
- benbristow 4y ago
  Not sure about Bitvise SSH server, thanks for the recommendation though, is that Zerotier works behind firewalls. Don't need to do any port forwarding etc. Very similar to Logmein's Hamachi. Since their laptop is usually on WiFi behind an ISP-provided router/modem combo this is ideal. Also don't need to force a static IP on the network so the port forwarding rules align properly. As I say, we're in different countries so this is very handy, it "just works". Also is secure as nobody can jump onto the virtual network without explicit whitelisting on ZeroTier's Web UI. You have to login (with 2FA) and click a checkbox to allow access if anyone wants to join.
- vetinari 4y ago
  RDP nowadays uses TLS.
  - password4321 4y ago
    True! My recommendation is influenced by 2019's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueKeep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueKeep Microsoft RDP remote code execution vulnerability.

IYasha 4y ago

Nah, when it comes to Linux, KRDC wins.

thebeardisred 4y ago

I'm a bit curious here. I see that RustDesk is licensed AGPL 3.0. At the same time the GUI component (Sciter - https://www.sciter.com https://www.sciter.com) is proprietary software with it's own non-compatible license (https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/blob/524a90ef7eab16575df9496f7e4c374bbd5fb1fe/license.htm https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/blob/524a90ef7eab16575...). Was the intention to use something like LGPL to stand on the shoulders of the external libraries or was the choice of AGPL just a hopeful goal with licensing issues to be resolved in the future?

NoraCodes 4y ago
It's a stated goal to replace sciter with Flutter.

legalcorrection 4y ago

For connecting between two Windows machines, I want to use the RDP protocol, but the built-in RDP client and server don't take care of the NAT/firewall traversal and such. Is there a software solution like TeamViewer or RustDesk that just does the leg work to set up the connection and then hands it off to the Windows built-in RDP libraries?

easrng 4y ago
Try the built in Quick Assist app? I think it does NAT traversal.

Technetium 4y ago

I *REALLY* want to love this, but it just honestly all-around doesn't work very well or reliably. The developer is almost impossible to communicate with. They don't have CI setup very well at all. It's also nearly impossible to selfhost. I'll be forced to keep using Anydesk until there's something that can at least match it in stability and features. There is potential for this to be good, but not without a LOT more change. Source for my experience is that I co-maintain this package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rustdesk https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rustdesk

kingrazor 4y ago

Another option if you don't mind running your own server is Mesh Central. It's open source as well. I've personally met the developer and he's a very knowledgeable and likeable person, if that means anything.

shimonabi 4y ago

I have tried self-hosting this with Docker a couple of weeks ago and it seems to work. You point the client to your server by including the address in the .exe filename on Windows. Be careful: encryption is not enabled by default.

e12e 4y ago
> Be careful: encryption is not enabled by default. Wait, what?

dang 4y ago

Rustdesk – Remote desktop software, an open source TeamViewer alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31456007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31456007 - May 2022 (102 comments)

rustdesk 4y ago

Thanks all of you. We did some stupid things before, especially the Wayland "Fix it" button, no excuse, we have removed it, and been working hard to make Wayland support work. https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/pull/932 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/pull/932 We are also removing Sciter, rewriting the UI with Flutter, https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/tree/flutter_desktop https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/tree/flutter_desktop. But Flutter does not support 32-bit Windows, we have to keep Sciter for 32-bit Windows version. As an open source project, we only have very limit bandwidth for you, the connection is not reliable sometime if you use our public servers. That's why we encourage the selfhost, and open source the server https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server. We are attempting to improve the bandwidth, https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/1026 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/1026. Here is a good video for selfhost which can help you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nzHm3xGz2I&t=1032s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nzHm3xGz2I&t=1032s We hope more contributors can join us to make it better. Here is our milestones: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/918 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/918 I do not know why @Technetium said "impossible to communicate", appologize if I made you not happy before. I just lost patience sometimes, it is really not an easy job to maintain an open source project like RustDesk. We communiated very well with RustDesk Server contributor, https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server/issues/36 https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server/issues/36.