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.
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.
That’s simply bad software practice, which was fixed once pointed out. Fact is that if they had done this on purpose, they wouldn’t have changed it and instead, would’ve came up with an excuse to keep it the same way.
I don’t keep track of who says what on this app. Many people in this thread have the idea that RustDesk is some sort of Chinese spyware that is secretly transmitting their files to the CCP. If that’s not your opinion, then I guess we are not in disagreement.
Yes, that’s the wrong way to do it, which is why they changed it. I’m not saying this is perfect software developed by experts, but the idea that RustDesk should be avoided at all cost is insane, specially when they have fixed every issue that was raised.
The only thing they are missing is a security audit done by a third party, which costs money and I doubt they care enough to pay for that just to stop all the finger pointing.
We’re not in disagreement about whether rustdesk is malware or not, but I think the developers being incompetent is also a perfectly valid reason to avoid it. Sure, they have fixed most if not all major issues that were reported to them eventually, but who knows when they’ll mess something up again.
Also, some issues weren’t really resolved timely, take for example the issue where rustdesk autostarted on each boot. That one has been actively ignored for over a year, which is the opposite of building trust.
This is not correct. While they have removed it from being installed on newer installs/updates, the certificate remains on the system that ran the corresponding version installer/upgrade unless it will be manually removed by the few percent that got the news.