RustDesk is often mentioned as an open source alternative.

It has a bunch of weird code smells that make me a bit hesitant to use it for supporting family members, but it seems to work well from what I read from others?

I use Teamviewer quite regularly, but that has some issues with Wayland. Free for personal use, but closed source with no self-hosting capabilities.

I've used TeamViewer, then AnyDesk and now RustDesk. TeamViewer and AnyDesk are both German companies.

RustDesk works really well and is fast. I switched from TeamViewer because they wanted money. I switched from AnyDesk because it gave me more problems with disconnecting, has the worst UI of the three and sometimes my screen would be a minute or more behind what the host was seeing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39256493 please exercise caution

Wow, I wouldn’t touch that with a 100 foot pole.

> TeamViewer and AnyDesk are both German companies.

Can I ask why you mentioned this? It stands out.

Because I happened to know it. They often make great stuff.

Weird code smell alright https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39256493

There's a lot of "just make it work" code in there. A "customer said software didn't work in China because of a missing cert, now importing cert on startup and it works" kind of deal.

For a while it used `sed` to disable Wayland on Linux in a way that only applies to Gnome (specifically on Ubuntu and a few other distros). The code also has a bunch of other exec()s with several commands piped into each other to parse the output.

None of it seems ill-intended, but it's code I would straight reject if I would be tasked to review it.

It's not the first quality Chinese software.

Somewhat cross-platform (I mostly use Windows)... I use Tailscale (or just wireguard) and RDP. RDP works great on Windows and is gaining more support in Linux. VNC works as a fallback, but is slow compared to RDP.

Not free, but I was using Remotix until they got bought out by Acronis who haven't really done much but increase the price and rebrand it (really long name "Acronis Cyber Protect Connect"). It does work on Linux and MacOS but I always found the performance to be lacking and the UI is workable but not great.

If you like selfhosted, then MeshCentral is what you should be looking at.

If you want a cloud thingy and it's just for personal, chrome remote desktop is decent enough.

If you need this to be highly performant (like accessing a crunchy 3d modeling rig from your ipad, or remote gaming) then Parsec is the best.

MeshCentral is great, just migrated all my rustdesk setup to it.

I mostly use it for family remote support and things tho, performance isn't amazing but it's plenty good.

Also supports things like relaying over an agent, hardware key authentication, file browsing. It's a little wonky in spots but overall it's such a great piece of software.

I use SimpleHelp; it's a self-hosted Java server and clients have to install an app; works on Windows and Mac and Linux. It's over port 80+443. Not FOSS.

Teamviewer is a no brainer, cross platform, to handle my retired dad's computer on the other side of the country and/or customer's screens on the other side of the world.

Teamviewer hasn't worked for me in years. At some point it started to claim I was using it for commercial purposes, and even after convincing support that this wasn't the case, I've never been able to maintain a connection for longer than a minute since.

Pretty much will refuse to work if you have a static IP Is they claim that's commercial.

I gave up on it for the same reason. Kept getting flagged for commercial use when all I used it for was ham radio stuff and helping my parents.

Sounds like a shakedown to me.

TeamViewer has horrible security history though.

TeamViewer is slow and expensive, but it does work well. IIRC they have Linux support now, but not 100% sure.

I was using TeamViewer on Linux fairly extensively over a decade ago, and I don't really recall having issues with it. I haven't used it much recently.

Apache Guacamole may be what you are looking for

"Apache Guacamole is a free and open-source, cross-platform, clientless remote desktop gateway maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. It allows users to control remote computers or virtual machines via a web browser, and allows administrators to dictate how and whether users can connect using an extensible authentication and authorization system."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Guacamole

Tailscale.

Steam Link is tailored for gaming, but it works great for remote access. Performance is excellent and it has clients for all major platforms.

Look up aspia