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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

It is a lot more advanced than VNC, and the open source world doesn't seem to have come up with any alternatives.

I don't quite understand what happened to SPICE. I know Red Hat deprecated it, and I can't tell if it was ever fully opensourced or not?

https://www.spice-space.org/developers.html

My theory is Wayland happened. As SPICE doesn't work that well through it. I would assume it's another case of a "niche" the Wayland protocol didn't account for, however.

Interesting theory. Any idea on why SPICE wouldn't work well through it? I don't have recall running into any issues with it.

A more Wayland-oriented remote desktop protocol would probably make for an even better VNC alternative, but I don't really know why SPICE never got the uptake it deserved.

Wayland. Move slow and break everything.

Wasn't aware SPICE was deprecated. However, I think it addresses a different use-case than RDP: SPICE is primarily designed for accessing virtual machines by connecting to their hypervisor. Thus it's designed to operate without VM guest awareness nor cooperation, going purely from a framebuffer.

This approach is fundamentally limited in terms of performance/responsiveness, as you're ultimately just trying to "guess" what's happening and apply best-effort techniques to speed things up, falling back to just using a video stream.

A proper remote desktop solution like RDP on Windows works in cooperation with the OS's GUI subsystem in a way that makes the RDP server aware of the GUI events, so it doesn't have to guess, and can offload compositing and some 2D operations directly to the client, rather than sending rendered bitmaps.

Thus it didn't catch on because it focuses on a narrow use-case nobody should be using except in emergency/break-glass situations (you should instead be remoting into the VM directly, for reasons explained above), and even for such situations, it didn't offer anything substantial over VNC, except everyone and their dog has a VNC client by now, but good luck finding a functional SPICE client for anything but Linux.

RustDesk is intended to be a TeamViewer alternative but works quite well as a simple remote desktop application:

https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk

I thought to have seen some negative comments about its security, anyone knowing more about it?

I haven't heard anything negative about it, and I can only find one CVE:

https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2024-25140/

Personally, I'm not exposing my installations to the Internet, so I feel relatively secure regardless.

They installed a root certificate on windows computers that could have been used to MITM all traffic.

I personally had issues with the project years before that when I tried to install their Linux .deb and they ran `pip install` as root in the pre install script inside the .deb. That caused so much havoc to clean up I was pissed at them for years. Now that idiocy is blocked by default in current versions of pip.

Yeah it just seemed like a slightly suss project to me. I did use it initially but uninstalled it after the Chinese root certificate incident.

I wonder if anyone has forked it...

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