RustDesk now supports true unattended remote access on Wayland

> RustDesk still does not support encrypted connections when self hosting

Not true at all. RustDesk connections are fully encrypted even when using a self-hosted server. What is not supported are encrypted direct endpoint-to-endpoint connections not going through a server at all, because that's not a use case RustDesk is designed for. The feature is intended for testing, which is why it's disabled altogether by default.

If your use case is focused on direct connections without a server, RustDesk is the wrong tool for the job. It's an open-source self-hostable analog to Teamviewer, the server is inherent to the design.

I think you bring up a fine point. Most applications have encryption built in and transparent to the user. While technical IT people in charge of infrastructure will not make this assumption, it is not unreasonable, at the same time, for small business / individual users, to not understand or know of this limitation.

VNC does not, for example, and you need to set up port forwarding through ssh. X2Go does....but I don't trust it terribly. So, RustDesk..what do you need to wrap it in? ssh?

I really want a better solution that VNC/X2Go..especially since I use hardware accelerated apps that need to use VGL to operate correctly (but underwhich operation is quite buggy).

Tailscale, or any encrypted mesh overlay is perfect for this. Infact I prefer it that way. Rustdesk can do what it does best at its core.

>does not support encrypted connections when self hosting

Factually incorrect. If you self host a relay/coordination server - encryption works as documented.

Would be nice if they did support that, but on a LAN you can always encrypt at layer 3 with WireGuard.

Your statement is not entirely accurate. This only applies when using Direct IP Access on local networks, which is off by default. Their justification and invitation to PRs is the final comment [1] on the issue you linked. Why are you leaving this information out of your comment?

1 - https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/issues/3714#issuecommen...

It's open-source, so just build it yourself with the tiny change. Something this trivial could be done with a 30 second prompt at this point, so there's not even an excuse of "too much effort".

I will note that the XKCD password scheme being proposed there is, in fact, completely insecure. A modern consumer GPU can crack "four random English words" in a day. You can argue that it's the user's choice to be allowed to use insecure passwords, but arguing that that scheme is actually secure is just wrong.

VNC and RustDesk are both remote desktop solutions, however, Rustdesk is considerably more performant than the VNC family, because the latter primarily sends framebuffer updates, while the former can use modern video codecs and temporal compression to encode screen changes much more efficiently.

Well first there was TeamViewer which was VNC with more bells and whistles then it became enshittified. Then anydesk came along and ate up teamviewer then that became enshittified, Now we have rustdesk which seems to hopefully be a bit more immune to being enshittified.

If you already use VNC this is not something for you

VNC is one way of doing remote GUI access (well, more a family of different protocols and products with different capabilities and tradeoffs). RustDesk is just another product that does the same thing but doesn't have a specific connection to VNC as a protocol so e.g. doesn't have to handle legacy authentication modes and stream formats. In my experience most remote access solutions beat VNC for performance, for example.

rustdesk just works, moonlight and sunshine is janky as hell outside the local network due to the fact it uses like 5 different streams.

I had a heck of a time ever getting that to work. Also, can that support multiple concurrent users?

From personal experience, Moonlight is pretty slow and high latency. Even Microsoft's RDP is better.

It's not VNC-based, so the performance is much better. It also supports multiple monitors.

Yes this will give you similar results.

There's VNC and VNC-likes (rdp, steam link, rustdesk, etc) which all do similar: stream a screen, allow remote keyboard/mouse, maybe redirect sound, maybe use video encoders.

There's also things like deskflow, which allow you to use one keyboard/mouse and control with multiple machines.

If you can look at your TV instead of your laptop, I highly recommend using KDE Connect

Usually the way to be able to even get the login screen is to use DRM/KMS based capture and use uinput for device emulation. It doesn't strictly need root but it does need privileges a user wouldn't have, like access to the DRM card nodes and uinput device. Sunshine does it this way.

It entirely sidesteps the problem of X vs Wayland, although this does mean the unattended physical seat can be physically taken over while you are remote.

Yea I need to know this before I even consider something like this. I'm guessing it's a daemon that runs as root in the background.

Unfortunately, no, it's not working. I use Rustdesk all the time. I've found a way, but it's really stupid. I have a GL.iNet Comet to manage my headless machine. That unit supports microphone passthrough. I send my mac's mic through that to ubuntu. It's an awful solution hah, but it works. I'm able to use dictation through that on Ubuntu. I didn't buy the comet specifically for mic use. I found out after the fact that it was able to do it.

Without self-hosting, how can I be sure that the middleman server layer won't affect my security?

Definitely a lifesaver for tech support!

And the fact it's self-hosted is priceless.

wonder if it can support gaming and sounds too ?