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Comment by vablings | Hacker News Reader

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

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RustDesk is also open source including the server so you can fully self-host.

That's not really true for quite some time now. Both client and the free server depend on a separate submodule that has no LICENSE file whatsoever. Because of that RustDesk is stuck in a limbo somewhere between open source, source-available and closed source. Also, the whole management of the project seems questionable. Also for some features a dll blob which is not open source is required with no source disclosed at all.

That's what BetterDesk is for: https://github.com/UNITRONIX/BetterDesk

I like that their server is just a single Go binary, but then they go and ruin that with a Node.js web UI and.. PostgreSQL?! Seems like complete overkill. I wonder what gripping limitations they faced with SQLite that they decided it needed PostgreSQL.

SQLite is still the default backend. Postgres is optional.

It looks like PostgreSQL is optional and SQLite is the default.

https://github.com/UNITRONIX/BetterDesk#prerequisites

Seems like that is just a server implementation that requires you to use stock RustDesk clients. So you can't really have a fully opensource RustDesk-like system without requiring a substantial chunk of unlicensed source code as well as a closed source dll blob(s).

I just glanced over the repo, deployment and comments around it and it seems like unconstrained AI slop or at least the project seems to be led by a person which can't use AI effectively for the purpose of software engineering.

I've noticed that RealVNC has hidden their formerly free VNC desktop client, now called RealVNC Classic Viewer, behind an enterprise subscription login, and replaced it with a different cloud first thing, RealVNC Connect Viewer, that requires a login to at least obtain, and is anemic in terms of features.

Not that RealVNC is VNC. However, enshittification has clearly taken another scalp.

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