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.

DO NOT USE THIS

This is a massive security risk and they have had so much controversy. They also routinely delete Github issues and discussions that question them. To top it off they are likely Chinese run.

Itsfoss is blogspam and often have many mistakes and wrong info. People should really stop posting links from them.

Wasn't there some controversy about this that it wasn't entirely open-source?

I self-host my own rustdesk server and it's awesome. It just works flawlessly.

I have setup a rustdesk server with docker, it was surprisingly easy to get started. It was for a friend who is managing the IT services of a small factory, the completely switched from TeamViewer and they are satisfied. More importantly their users, who are worse than your average windows user, found the transition relatively painless.

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.

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

I always neglected it because of its name. I thought it's something for rust...

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.

Does this work on a headless box?

I've been using MeshCentral lately, it does the job but the UI leaves something to be desired.

Free Software*