Hi!
What remote desktop tool do you use? I’m looking for something that works across Linux, Mac and Windows, with unattended access and file transfer.
Can you recommend any tools based on your experience?
I use rustdesk, but there has been some reports it may be a bit dodgy, but for what I do it is ok:
It’s a strange thing @xircon. The more I read the official responses from the Rustdesk reps (and HopTopDesk reps, a Rustdesk fork) in various threads, the less confident I feel 
Here’s a couple options I’m considering, but I believe both of these require you to self-host the server component in some way, which may not be an option you’re considering @Talor.
MeshCentral
The developers of this worked at Intel for decades, but now work at Microsoft.
Apache Guacamole
This provides a self-hosted clientless gateway for various existing access technologies, like VNC, RDP and SSH.
You can check it out here https://www.helpwire.app/linux-remote-desktop/ It’s a cross-platform tool with a good range of features. I’ve been using it recently and haven’t run into any issues.
Rustdesk doesn’t require configuration to be able to access the remote device, it’s like teamviewer and anydesk, it’s mostly for providing remote support.
The linked reddit thread is old, I’m not sure if everything listed there is true anymore or not alarmist, for example the wayland issue and most projects need to have chinese servers for a lot of reasons, that doesn’t mean they’re exfiltrating data of non china based clients to the chinese government. While who knows what teamviewer, anydesk & co does with the data, since they’re closed source, I don’t think my data is safer in the US than in China, even if it happens.
As far as I can tell meshcentral and guacamole needs some setup on the device/network to be accessible, they’re smaller and simpler projects than rustdesk, because they put the burden of configuring accessibility on the user. If you want more safety you should configure your own stuff and don’t rely on someone else’s server like rustdesk’s out of the box. But at least with rustdesk you can set up your own relay server.
helpwire is closed source too, so I don’t think it’s a good alternative, there are many closed source remote software out there and you can’t assume they’re any safer than rustdesk. These things need at least an open source server to even start to consider them as safe.
You could look at a hardware solution as well. Something like the JetKVM, NanoKVM, or GLI Comet (there are a bunch of others though, some are pretty cheap…depends on your needs). I use these in combination with Tailscale and they work fabulously.
I’ve been giving MeshCentral a test drive today, and I’m quite impressed with it. I’m successfully remotely controlling an EndeavourOS system over the Internet, from another EndeavourOS system.
I quite like it’s featured web interface, it gives me a lot of great controls over the remote systems I’m managing (PC’s running interactive experiences in commercial spaces).
Setting up the agent/client on the PC was a simple copy/paste of a command. The agent persists, through restarts etc.
I set up the server on a cloud based FreeBSD Jail. The simplest setup only requires a Node.js server. I chose to put it behind an Nginx reverse proxy though, which performs TLS termination and offers some security and performance advantages.
The cloud-based server step is probably going to be the only sticking point for folk, but I can confirm, it’s very lightweight. I have it running on a modest single core 1GB cloud server, which is also used as simple web-server for other tasks. I was already paying for that server, so the added overhead is $0.