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On my list of tools to check out RustDesk (as replacement for TeamViewer, Remote Desktop and similar)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/05

For non-Windows systems, I have used TeamViewer in the past and when they started being obnoxious reverted mostly to VNC derived alternatives. For Windows, I’d usually combined VPN with Remote Desktop.

Recently, I found out that during my first rectum cancer year (and for others, the first COVID-19 year), the development of RustDesk – which can be self-hosted – started as an open source project on [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – rustdesk/rustdesk: An open-source remote desktop application designed for self-hosting, as an alternative to TeamViewer. with their first commit being [Wayback/Archive] Initial commit · wabarc/wayback@650ea87 · GitHub.

I got pointed to this in [Wayback/Archive] Your Remote Desktop SUCKS!! Try this instead (FREE + Open Source) – YouTube.

One of the main things to figure out is how reliably RustDesk does firewall hole punching*.

Another personal interest is to learn more about Rust and Dart, the main programming languages in which RustDesk is written.

Here are some links:

  • more about hole punching:

Prior notes

After drafting this post and having a good night of sleep, I remembered the next day that I saved some old notes on RustDesk. After a few minutes of digging, I found them back – it contained history when you could use it for free through the RustDesk servers. How cool was that!

My notes

RustDesk is on my list to play around with: [Wayback/Archive] RustDesk | Open source remote desktop software | The Open Source TeamViewer Alternative

Open source virtual / remote desktop infrastructure for everyone!

A remote desktop software, the open source TeamViewer alternative, works out of the box, no configuration required. You have full control of your data, with no concerns about security. You can use our public rendezvous/relay server, or self-hosting, or write your own server.

It should be on par with TeamViewer, which originally was based on VNC (Virtual_Network_Computing), but is both open source and uses their own open protocol which is different from the RFB protocol used by all VNC implementations.

More links:

Note that spring 2023, their beta web-access had a certificate problem so I tweeted [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “Hi @rustdesk, I just noticed that http://web.rustdesk.com runs on the CN http://rustdesk.com certificate (without a subdomain) which results in NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID I know it’s beta, but still would appreciate fixing it (;”

Screenshot with web.rustdesk.com showing `NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID`

Screenshot with connection details for web.rustdesk.com

This might have never worked as per:

Query: [Wayback/Archive] rustdesk protocol – Google Search

--jeroen

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