Ask HN: Is there a remote desktop program as good (and cheap) as Dropbox? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a remote desktop program as good (and cheap) as Dropbox?

5 pointsstaunch13 comments

I know there are dozens of remote desktop apps. I've used many of them including GoToMeeting, VNC, etc. It's been a while but I can't find any that seems super great. They all seem to be complicated or sucky.

Is there any cross-platform, cheap, secure, trusthworthy Dropbox-like program that does remote desktop?

I want to just install a tiny little program on all my computers and very quickly be able to see the desktop of any of them from any of them.

I imagine a little taskbar icon that I click and there's a list of all available computers. I select one and it opens a window with the desktop visible.

My primary machine is Linux (Ubuntu), but I have Windows and Mac computers as well.

If this doesn't exist I would definitely use and promote the hell out of it. I'd even be willing to pay some smallish yearly fee for it. If it doesn't exist I highly suggest someone on HN get to work making it.

The remote desktop industry seems to be very similar to remote storage was pre-Dropbox.

Then again, I'm hoping I'm wrong and this already exists, so I don't have to wait :-)

Have you looked at http://www.logmein.com? They have a free version, and it's a solid in-browser remote desktop program that just runs a small background program on any computer you want to connect to. Only issue is I'm not sure they have support for Linux... could be a deal-breaker for you.

It seems the closest, but it reminds me of the predecessors to Dropbox a lot. I couldn't even figure out which of their 7 products I should choose.

Start off the with free version. When you need another feature, see what the lowest tier is that has your desired features, get that. Repeat as needed.

Are you a developer?

Most of the pieces exist as open source (assuming VNC is good enough for you), wrapping a nice GUI around them using something like wxPython might not be to hard.

It's an interesting idea for sure. I've been fiddling around with tunneling VNC over PageKite (my project) a bit, but it hadn't yet resulted in anything I'd call a "product vision". This post brings me quite a few steps closer to that. Too bad my TODO list is already rather long...

If you are interested and able to do some coding, I could probably be talked into helping out and providing some infrastructure. ;-)

I am. I have my own startup to worry about though!

It's very tempting because I think it's the kind of thing that could see Dropbox-like success and there is a bunch of open source code to borrow from.

I'm confused. Dropbox does file-sharing, not remote desktop. Also, your requirements seem to want your computers to not be synced, hoever Dropbox syncs across all clients - so differentiating between computers (e.g. "a list of all available computers") is not necessary.

Unfortunately I do not know of any out of the box solutions. You could setup samba shares on each computer and if you want to access them anywhere then proxy through Amazon. Otheriwse, I'm hoping this might help you better phrase your request.

I just mean the simplicity and quality of Dropbox, not synchronizing anything.

Have you seen https://www.copilot.com/? Looks pretty close to what you want.

Yeah. That's more of a transactional style help desk tool.

GBridge is pretty decent if you use windows http://www.gbridge.com/

http://teamviewer.com You don't even need to install it to run.

Teamviewer is another nice remote desktop tool that has a bunch of neat features. It is also... free.

I like jump desktop for my iOSneeds

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